Sources at the EU Headquarters in Brussels have told CORE that UK officials are now resigned to BNFL being hauled in front of the European Courts of Justice over the issue of Sellafield’s 44 year-old ‘Dirty Thirty’ B30 plant. An announcement is expected to made tomorrow Friday 3rd September.
This follows a Directive from the European Commission, issued in March this year, in which a number of complaints and requirements were levelled against BNFL and the B30 storage pond. They included:
the lack of detailed records of the materials stored in the B30 pond the high radiation levels in B30 and the poor visibility of the pond water, both of which prevented Euratom inspectors from carrying out verification of the stored materials. the continuing lack of implementation by BNFL of plans to resolve the issues, despite twenty years of requests by the Commission to do so.
Central to the issue are the estimated 1.3 tonnes of plutonium believed to be in the pond, including some that is lying as corroded fuel sludge at the bottom . The conditions which prevented proper access by Inspectors was described by the Commission in March as having become ‘untenable’, posing a direct challenge to the credibility of the EC’s nuclear materials ‘Safeguards’ regime.
A CORE spokesperson said today: “BNFL’s slap-dash housekeeping and off-hand treatment of the Commission Directive speaks volumes about the company’s willingness and ability to conform to the most basic Safegards standards. Let’s hope a European court appearance wakes them up”
Opening around 1960, the B30 pond was used for storing irradiated fuel from Magnox reactors. The pond currently holds an estmated 1400 storage skips of fuel, many of which have been shown by video survey to have toppled over. A 1996 report on B30 described the ad-hoc dumping of scaffold poles, tools, buckets and hoses on top of the fuel skips and highly radioactive sludge that already existed.