At Carlisle Crown Court today, British Nuclear Group (BNG) was fined £500,000 for an accident in April last year at Sellafield’s Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP). The accident was classified at Level 3 on the International Nuclear Event Scale.
BNG, who operate THORP under contract to site owners the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), had pleaded guilty in an initial hearing at Whitehaven Magistrates Court earlier this year to three charges brought by the Health & Safety Executive (HSE). The charges, under the Nuclear Installations Act 1965, related to breaches of Sellafield site licence conditions, and were summarized by HSE as (i) failing to make and comply with written instructions, (ii) failing to ensure that safety systems are in good working order and (iii) failing to ensure that radioactive material is contained and, if leaks occur, that they are detected and reported.
In fining BNG, Judge Openshaw told the Court today that, because BNG had pleaded guilty, a fine of £750,000 was being reduced to £500,000 – consisting of fines of £300,000, £100,000 and £100,000 for each of the three offences respectively. In reminding the Court of the ‘cumulative failures’ and the ‘worker culture of tolerating alarms’ that had lead to the accident, he added that BNG’s failure to detect the leak ‘probably within days’ rather than 8 months was a serious failure worthy of condemnation.
Largely dismissing the mitigating circumstances put forward in BNG’s defence, Judge Openshaw rejected outright the submission that as the risks and consequences of the accident had been nil (no criticality, no environmental impact or injury) the overall offence was not serious. He ordered BNG to pay Costs amounting to £68,000 and allowed the Company 28 days to pay.
The accident, reported to the HSE’s Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII) on 20th April 2005, entailed the undetected spillage of 83,000 litres of highly radioactive dissolved nuclear fuel and nitric acid over an estimated 8 month period from fractured pipework in the plant’s Feed Clarification Cell. The plant was closed immediately and has remained shut down since then. During the closure, which has seen 18 months of reprocessing business put on hold, 2 improvement notices and 49 recommendations have been served on BNG by the NII along with a further 18 recommendations imposed by BNG following its own Board of Investigation into the accident.
After the Crown Court sentencing, CORE’s spokesman Martin Forwood said: “Today’s fine reflects the level of gross negligence which lead directly to the accident. Together with the £2M fine imposed by the NDA in August for failing to maintain appropriate levels of safety, we hope BNG will learn from this self-inflicted fiasco – but we’re not holding our breath, for as BNG’s own Board of Investigation concluded, worker culture at Sellafield is such that a similar accident cannot be ruled out in the future”.
At the time of the accident, (THORP’s 11th year), the plant was running almost 3 years behind schedule, with just 5729 tonnes of spent fuel reprocessed from a total of 7000 tonnes originally scheduled for completion in the first 10 years of operation (the baseload). The outstanding fuel includes over 700 tonnes of foreign fuel, with the remainder being UK fuel from British Energy’s (BE) Advanced Gas Cooled reactor stations. If and when these ‘baseload’ contracts are completed, a further volume of fuel (post-baseload), largely from BE, is also contracted for reprocessing at THORP.
Restart of the plant, already re-scheduled a number of times, is now set for early 2007, providing all required recommendations have been ‘closed out’ to the satisfaction of the NII and with the agreement of the NDA. THORP’s future however currently remains under close review by the NDA and by the Government who will make the final decision as to whether further reprocessing at the plant can be justified.
The costs of the accident, not yet fully quantified, have been put variously between £50M and Hundreds of £M. Modifications (rather than repairs) to THORP’s damaged Cell, now completed, will allow an eventual re-start of the plant by by-passing the damaged equipment and pipework. As a result of the modified system, THORP’s future throughput rate is expected to be limited to well below the plant’s design specification.
Martin Forwood added: “We have major concerns about the restart of THORP given that the systems and pipework that will be used share exactly the same history as that which failed so comprehensively during the accident from metal fatigue and other stresses. As the plant can never again operate as originally designed, there are no good grounds for resuscitating this White Elelephant. We will continue to call for its immediate closure”.