Plans to ship plutonium MOX fuel assemblies from Sellafield to the small German port of Nordenham near Bremerhaven on the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority’s ageing ship Atlantic Osprey will have put opposition activists in Germany on full alert. Details of the transport, divulged in a letter by a Nordenham administrator after an 8th August 2012 meeting in Germany between Nordenham authorities and energy company EoN (owners of the MOX fuel) showed the MOX shipment scheduled for ‘the second half of September’ this year.
The use of the Atlantic Osprey for the German transport was confirmed by INS to a local liaison committee meeting at Barrow-in-Furness on 17th July this year, though all other details were withheld on security grounds.
The Atlantic Osprey, built in 1986, is a roll-on roll-off ferry purchased third hand by British Nuclear Fuels plc (BNFL) in 2001 and converted to carry radioactive materials. Of the UK’s fleet of designated nuclear cargo ships, the Atlantic Osprey is the only ship not to be custom-built and is now past the age when its sister ships have historically been laid-up and scrapped (at or before 25 years’service) by ship managers International Nuclear Services (INS), a subsidiary company of the NDA.
Unlike its sister ships which have previously undertaken highly contentious MOX shipments from France and the UK to Japan, the Atlantic Osprey is not double-hulled, has only a single engine and has no naval canon fitted to deter terrorists. With its chequered history as a nuclear carrier that includes an engine-room fire and breakdowns at sea, a recent INS assessment (2010) of the Atlantic Osprey concedes not only a reduced ‘public acceptance and political credibility’ of transporting Category 1 nuclear material (plutonium, MOX fuel) on the ship, but also admits that reservations about the Atlantic Osprey’s continued use for such Category 1 cargoes had been expressed by France’s safety authority.
The assessment also confirmed that, with plans to sell or scrap the ship in the near future, its Sonardyne sunken vessel location system was to be removed and fitted onto the 25-year old ship Oceanic Pintail (ex Pacific Pintail) – recently saved from the scrapyard and transferred to NDA ownership in order to take over the Atlantic Osprey’s European and Atlantic work.
CORE’s spokesman Martin Forwood said today: “Despite its obvious shortcomings and the French reservations, INS appears hell-bent on shipping this MOX fuel to Germany on a third-hand ship with second class safety and kept afloat on first class INS PR alone”.
16 MOX fuel assemblies for Germany’s Grohnde nuclear power station were fabricated at the now defunct Sellafield MOX Plant (SMP) between 2007 and 2011. Bringing down the final curtain on Sellafield’s hapless and costly involvement with MOX production, the fuel assemblies will be transported via West Cumbria’s notoriously poor road network and under heavily armed escort to the ship’s regular port of Workington or its registered port of Barrow-in-Furness. Each of the MOX fuel assemblies contains 16.5 kg of plutonium, making a total of 264 kg of prime terrorist material. The transport scheduled for later this month will see 8 of the MOX fuel assemblies shipped to Nordenham, with the remaining 8 fuel assemblies due for transport in November.
CORE’s spokesman added: “The shipment of such highly dangerous nuclear material should never be entrusted to a ship not only past its sell-by date but also described recently in the Scottish press as a rust-bucket. Given its known safety and security weaknesses which now include the apparent lack of the vital sonardyne sunken vessel location system, using the Atlantic Osprey for the German MOX is a prime example of the nuclear industry putting business before safety. Common sense dictates that these plans should be abandoned immediately”.
The Atlantic Osprey is due back in the port of Workington on 9th September having transported a shipment of Belgian nuclear waste from Dounreay to Antwerp.