Campaigners from local group CORE (Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment) have hit out at Italian plans to off-load 235 tonnes of irradiated (spent) nuclear fuel onto the UK or France either as a waste product or through reprocessing at Sellafield’s THORP plant. Never originally contracted for reprocessing, the spent fuel and other Italian wastes have been documented as being destined for long-term management/disposal by Italian authorities in their own country.
The nuclear industry’s Nuclear Fuel journal of 3rd January reveals that the Italian state-owned organization SOGIN (Societa Gestione Impianti Nucleari) intends to put the work out to tender to BNFL and to France’s COGEMA in February or March this year. BNFL is aware of the plan but has not yet received an official approach from Italy about reprocessing. SOGIN expects that bids for the work would be evaluated and contracts concluded between April and June 2005.
Italy abandoned its nuclear power programme in 1987 following a post-Chernobyl public referendum which called for all the country’s nuclear power stations to be closed down. As a result, and with no operating nuclear facilities, Italy has no means of re-using the plutonium and uranium recovered by reprocessing. SOGIN has admitted as much, telling the Nuclear Fuel journal that without facilities ‘of course we are trying to leave all fresh materials at BNFL’.
CORE’s campaign coordinator Martin Forwood said today “The whole point of reprocessing is that the materials are repatriated for re-use as new fuel by the customer. Impotent Italy can’t do this and we view the plan as a blatant Italian attempt at dumping via the back door. We will fight it all the way and believe that any investigation by UK authorities will reveal the plan to be an outright scam”
In 2003, the Italian Government was forced by public opposition to abandon the site it had selected as Italy’s national waste repository. The need for the dump has increasingly been driven by anxieties (post 9/11) about the security of the spent fuel which has been languishing in a number of storage ponds throughout Italy for the past 15 years or more. With no Italian dump on the horizon, many observers see it being no mere coincidence that, against this background, SOGIN is under pressure to export its problems.
In 1997 UK Ministers and regulators were advised by the Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee (RWMAC) that just such a situation might arise ‘where a foreign concern was willing to enter into a reprocessing contract … with a United Kingdom company in order to rid itself of what is construed as a waste management problem, possibly one of inadequate or hazardous storage’.
Martin Forwood, convicted in 2003 for physically opposing an Italian shipment at Barrow Docks, added “RWMAC describes a plan such as this as ‘sham recovery’ where disposal of the materials in the UK is the real reason for sending it rather than any love of reprocessing. This accurately sums up the Italian plan and we have already alerted the NDA, the Government, CoRWM and the relevant regulator”.