At a meeting of the Ramsden Dock Terminal Stakeholder Group (RDTSG) held at the nuclear shipping terminal at Barrow-in-Furness on the 19th December, a number of issues relating to ships and nuclear transports were presented by International Nuclear Services (INS). As a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), INS is responsible for the commercial management of the nuclear fleet.
The fleet of five vessels includes three ships owned by Pacific Nuclear Transport Limited (PNTL) and two by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA). PNTL is jointly owned by INS, Areva of France and Japanese companies, and its ships Pacific Heron, Pacific Egret and Pacific Grebe have recently been custom-built in Japanese yards.
In a somewhat surprising move INS confirmed to the Committee that the Pacific Pintail – a once-armed and ageing stalwart of the original PNTL fleet (with a history of highly contentious international transports of MOX fuel and plutonium) was to being given a new lease of life, a new name and its ownership transferred to the NDA. To be renamed as the Oceanic Pintail, the ship is to operate ‘around Europe and North America’ carrying nuclear cargos including vitrified High Level Waste being repatriated to Sellafield’s European reprocessing customers. The transport of MOX fuel has not been excluded.
The surprise for many observers is that the working life of the Oceanic Pintail, built in 1987, is to be extended despite reaching 25 years of age in 2012. Whilst INS rejects CORE’s understanding that its ships are retired after 25 years as a matter of policy, the Oceanic Pintail’s old sister ships in the PNTL fleet – the Pacific Crane, Swan, Teal and Sandpiper – were all taken out of service at or before completing 25 years service. Despite its current refurbishment at Barrow’s Ramsden Dock, the life extension to the Oceanic Pintail will doubtless raise safety and security concerns about the use of an ageing ship to transport highly radioactive materials in busy commercial waters.
The second vessel owned by the NDA – the Atlantic Osprey – is already 26 years old, and was purchased third-hand by BNFL in 2001. Converted from a roll-on-roll-off car ferry to carry nuclear materials, the ship has operated largely from the Port of Workington. Currently plying the same waters as those earmarked for the Oceanic Pintail, the Atlantic Osprey has transported a wide range of nuclear materials and also undertaken non-nuclear work. Whilst the ship is next scheduled (no date given) to transport the final batch of MOX fuel produced at Sellafield’s now defunct MOX plant (SMP) to Germany for the Grohnde power station, sources other than INS suggest that further work for the Atlantic Osprey is likely to include shipping nuclear waste from Dounreay to Belgium. The transport of an estimated 150 tonnes of cemented nuclear waste resulting from the historic reprocessing at Dounreay of fuel from the Belgian BR2 reactor is scheduled to start in Autumn 2012 and finish in 2016 – when the ship will be 30 years old.
Other issues featuring at the RDTSG Committee included some further consequences of the Japanese earthquake/tsunami and the Fukushima accident, the shipment of ‘contaminated water’ from France to Sellafield and outline plans for the rail transport of old reactor fuel from the Dounreay facility in Caithness to Sellafield.
On Japan, the Committee was told that no date had yet been set for the delayed shipment of MOX fuel from France’s MOX plant to Japan. Originally scheduled to be made earlier this year, postponement of the shipment was announced by the Japanese utilities shortly after the earthquake and accident.
Without providing detail, INS also confirmed that an in-house assessment had been made of the consequences of a PNTL ship with nuclear cargo being washed ashore by a tsunami and that, in future, a formal procedure is to be introduced for ships’ captains to respond to tsunami warnings when loading/unloading at Japanese utility docks by having ships’ engines on ‘5 minute readiness’ to evacuate the dock.
The Committee was also told that a ‘final consignment’ of some 600 litres of contaminated water from the industry’s now defunct Dunkirk marine terminal was being held at Barrow prior to its transport to Sellafield for disposal. The contaminated water, purposely trapped at the French facility, had arisen from the run-off of rain water from spent fuel containers arriving by rail at Dunkirk from European power stations for onward shipment to Sellafield and the return transports by sea from Sellafield to Europe. When asked why the contaminated water could not have been retained in France for disposal, an INS spokesman said that as the contamination was believed to come largely from Sellafield, it was appropriate that it should be returned to the UK. The Dunkirk terminal, operated by BNFL, was closed down shortly after the last shipments of spent fuel from Europe had been made in 2005.
In a presentation by Direct Rail Services (DRS) – another wholly owned subsidiary of the NDA – the Committee heard that plans were now in hand to construct a rail head in the north of Scotland through which around 44 tonnes of spent fuel from Dounreay’s fast breeder reactor would be transported for reprocessing at Sellafield. The rail-head will be located some 25km south-east of Dounreay at Georgemas Junction where the north-bound rail link from Inverness splits into the two lines that serve Wick and Thurso respectively. Work on the rail-head is expected to start in the New Year and the first of 40 transports of Dounreay material expected by the NDA to commence in Summer 2012.
On non-operational matters, INS confirmed that after successfully acting as shipping agents for the industry’s nuclear transports for some 40 years, Barrow company James Fisher and Son had lost the contract as agents for the nuclear fleet. As from April 2012 the agency will be taken over by Serco, an international government services company which, under competitive tender, was awarded the 4-year contract valued at £3M by the NDA on the 11th November 2011.
Despite Serco’s claims to be ‘an international service company that improves the quality and efficiency of essential services that matter to millions of people around the world’ -and to have experience in the nuclear field – its replacement of James Fisher & Sons as shipping agents has raised a number of local eyebrows given Fisher’s long service and Serco’s lack of experience in the marine transport of nuclear materials.