Few observers will be surprised at the Government’s ‘gung-ho’ approach to dealing with the UK’s plutonium stockpile, announced today by the Department of Energy and Climate Change, with its preferred option to convert the plutonium into mixed oxide fuel (MOX) for use at some unspecified date in the future in UK reactors that may never get built.
As another nuclear no-hoper for West Cumbria, the historic preoccupation of successive Government’s to repeat the fiascos that litter the UK nuclear industry’s track record will also come as no surprise, though the abject failure to make MOX fuel in the Sellafield MOX Plant (SMP) over the last decade should have served as the strongest deterrent to ‘more of the same’ being inflicted on West Cumbria by a remote Government.
At the very least, all options for managing Sellafield’s 112 tonne plutonium stockpile should have been given equal weight for consultation purposes, whereby a preferred option would logically be selected only after all public responses have been fully assessed.
CORE spokesman Martin Forwood said today:
“Yet again the public are being asked to respond to a consultation on which a decision has clearly already been made. Unable to say where or when the MOX fuel will be used in the UK or identify any overseas demand, the Government admits that its preference to convert the plutonium stockpile to MOX fuel is an expedient way of getting rid of it rather than offering a viable option as a commercial reactor fuel”.
CORE will be responding to the consultation which ends on the 10th May – urging that the stockpile of weapons-useable plutonium is put out of harms way as a nuclear waste.