Heightened security around BNFL’s two armed MOX ships and increased dockside activity over the past week has preceded the ships’ departure from BNFL’s Marine Terminal at Ramsden Dock, Barrow-in-Furness this morning. The security has included UKAEA police squads guarding the terminal around the clock, sweeps of the ships’ hulls by a police diving team and police inflatables patrolling the dock waters.
Despite the ships carrying no more than empty transport flasks, Barrow Docks were sealed off for the departures at 0900 today and both ships were escorted out to sea by police inflatables. The Pacific Pintail and Pacific Teal will take around 6 weeks to reach Japan where they will collect the MOX fuel produced at Sellafield’s MOX Demonstration Facility (MDF) and subsequently rejected by BNFL’s customer Kansai Electric after BNFL was forced to admit that the plutonium fuel’s quality assurance data had been deliberately falsified by MDF workers.
Following more than 2 years of storage in ponds at Kansai Electric’s Takahama power station, the rejected fuel containing 255 kg of plutonium has degraded as a result of the build up of radioactive decay products in the plutonium/uranium mixture, downgrading it to a waste product. As a result of the changed radioactive inventory of the fuel, Kansai Electric has recently had to withdraw their application to licence the transport flask which will carry the waste. Questions are today being asked in Japan as to the validity of the ships’ departure from Barrow with an unlicensed flask/s. One empty flask was loaded onto the Pacific Pintail on Thursday (24th April) and a second empty flask may have been loaded onto the Pacific Teal last week.
The ships are expected to arrive in Japan in mid-June (at the height of the football World Cup) and leave Takahama for the UK in early July only when their departure can be given the physical protection required from security services freed-up after the World Cup. The Pacific Pintail, with the Pacific Teal as escort, is expected to carry the waste cargo back to Barrow, arriving sometime in August. The waste fuel will be transported under heavy guard by rail to Sellafield’s THORP receipt & storage ponds. The THORP reprocessing plant has no licence to process the degraded plutonium fuel rods which are therefore likely to languish indefinitely as yet more nuclear waste at Sellafield.
A CORE spokesperson said today “ We are wholly opposed to the return of this dangerous plutonium waste to the UK. The shipment is at raised risk of terrorist action and represents a blatant breach of Government policy which forbids the import of nuclear waste into the UK. As a ‘shipment of shame’ this has to be BNFL’s most humiliating experience yet, and one that will be carried out under the unforgiving glare of the world’s media. After September 11th, international condemnation of the shipment is guaranteed – especially from en-route countries where opposition to nuclear sea transports has intensified since 1999.
Coinciding with the anniversary of the Chernobyl accident and with the climax of the Irish postcard cxampaign against Sellafield, the ships’ departure today is likely to inflame the Irish Government whose case against Sellafield and MOX is currently before the International Tribunal of the Sea in Hamburg.