In a draft of its next 3-year programme for Sellafield (2008-2011) published today, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) plans to extend the life of Sellafield’s magnox reprocessing plant from 2012 to ‘2016 or later’.
The magnox reprocessing plant B205 is responsible for a majority of the site’s overall discharges. The planned extension to its working life of at least a further four years will see high levels of radioactive sea discharges continuing for the next decade and will infuriate many Governments and Irish and North-East Atlantic communities. It will also renew serious doubts about the UK’s ability to meet the discharge targets it signed up as an OSPAR signatory.
The OSPAR (Oslo Paris) convention in Portugal in 1998 agreed to a strategy that would ensure the progressive reduction of concentrations of radioactive substances in the marine environment such that, by 2020, they add ‘close to zero’ to historic levels. The agreement is widely accepted as being the principal driver for BNFL’s subsequent announcement that the reprocessing plant would have to close around 2012. In its 2002 UK Strategy for Radioactive Discharges 2001-2020, the UK Government confirmed that ‘… the end of magnox fuel reprocessing will be a key element in further discharge reductions’.
CORE’s spokesperson Martin Forwood said today
“ This plan blows apart any last semblance of green awareness claimed by the NDA which seems to have completely lost control of Sellafield’s commercial operations. It is disastrous news for the marine environment and we will fight to overturn any life extension to this clapped-out and polluting plant”.
Signing the 1998 OSPAR agreement on behalf of the UK Government, the then Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott said “I was ashamed of Britain’s record in the past but now we have shed the tag of the Dirty Old Man of Europe and have joined the family of nations”.
In draft form (for public consultation) the NDA’s 3-year plan provides the barest detail about the reason for extending the magnox reprocessing programme other than to say that it results from ‘logistical difficulties’ at Sellafield related to delayed plans in defuelling magnox power station reactors. Martin Forwood commented:
This lack of detailed explanation (transparency) is now par for the course with the NDA. ’Logistical difficulties’ will include a whole range of issues and problems. Without that detail, the consultation exercise is a complete sham”.