At midday today (11th March 2010), under close police security, one transport flask of High Level Waste (HLW) was delivered by rail from Sellafield to Barrow docks where it was loaded onto the ship Atlantic Osprey for transport to Holland. Departure from Barrow is expected on this evening’s high tide.
The HLW, contained in 28 cannisters within the transport flask, is being shipped to Holland under the terms of the reprocessing contract signed by the Dutch Dodewaard nuclear power station with Sellafield’s THORP plant some thirty years ago. The vitrified (glassified) HLW being returned consists of a cocktail of ‘blended’ wastes from the reprocessed fuel from all THORP’s foreign customers – not just the Dutch – and will also contain wastes from Sellafield’s older Magnox reprocessing plant with whom Holland has no contracts.
The Atlantic Osprey is owned by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) and normally operates from the Port of Workington which, unlike Barrow, does not have suitable crane facilities to lift the 100 tonne HLW transport flask on to the ship. Built in 1986 in Germany and bought second-hand by British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) in 2001, the Atlantic Osprey lacks the basic safety elements that are deemed necessary for Barrow’s other nuclear ships – it has only one engine and is single-hulled. The ship has been involved in a number of incidents since 2001. These include an engine room fire in the Manchester Ship Canal, and a prolonged loss of engine power whilst amid the Irish ferry routes.
CORE’s Martin Forwood said today: “Shipping these highly radioactive nuclear materials in a second-hand ship with second rate safety is the height of irresponsibility and poses unacceptable risks to the marine environment and communities along the busy Irish Sea and English Channel shipping route. It also raises major concerns about the detrimental effect, including security restrictions, that similar transports will impose over the next 10 years on the development of the marina and dockside private housing which form part of Barrow’s vital dock regeneration plans”.
As with all other nuclear countries, Holland has no permanent disposal site for the HLW. Today’s shipment will be placed in a storage facility at Vlissingen (south west Holland) operated by COVRA (Centrale Organisatie Voor Radioactief Afval)
The shipment to Holland is only the second HLW shipment to be made from Sellafield to its overseas customers. The first, some 15 years later than originally projected, was to Japan on 21st January this year onboard the Pacific Sandpiper, the ship arriving at Aomori in northern Japan on 9th March 2010.