Following in the footsteps of Sellafield’s Calder Hall last year, the Chapelcross nuclear power station in Scotland is to be shut down immediately. The station’s four Magnox 50MW reactors, which were taken off-line in February this year, will not be re-started as originally planned by British Nuclear Fuels plc.
A CORE spokesperson said today ” We welcome the news of the premature closure of these military reactors which are years past their sell-by date. It shuts the lid on decades of involvement with the UK’s nuclear weapons programme, and will result in less magnox fuel having to be reprocessed at Sellafield “.
BNFL has admitted that an economic case for continuing electricity production at Chapelcross can no longer be justified commercially and that the company intends to prepare the shut-down reactors for decommissioning in readiness for handover to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) next year.
Five years ago the company had put a 2010 closure date on the station. This was subsequently advanced to 2008 and then to March 2005. Adjustments to the closure dates followed a major accident at Chapelcross Reactor 3 in July 2001 when 24 irradiated fuel elements fell 80 feet down a defuelling shaft, and the later discovery of shrinkage and distortion to the graphite moderators around the reactor cores’. The latter was responsible for safety problems with fuelling and de-fuelling the reactors and use of the control rods.
Built in 1959 Chapelcross employs a workforce of around 450 and the reactors were expected to operate for up to 50 years. Their military connection has been the production of tritium gas for use in the UK’s Trident missile warheads.