Details of the troubled HLW return shipment from Sellafield to Holland earlier this year were given to Barrow’s Ramsden Dock Liaison Committee meeting yesterday the 10th May.
Operators of the nuclear cargo vessel fleet International Nuclear Services (INS) provided some clarification as to why the sailing from Barrow of the Atlantic Osprey – already loaded with one transport flask containing 28 canisters of vitrified HLW and scheduled to leave port on 11th March – had to be delayed by 24 hours, and why it then took the ship almost two days longer than expected to reach the Dutch port of Vlissingen with its hazardous cargo.
On the delayed sailing, the Committee heard from INS that as the HLW was loaded onto the Atlantic Osprey, a similar consignment of HLW from Sellafield had just arrived in Japan where it was found that the contents of the transport flask did not fully tally with the official paperwork – an unspecified number of canisters being ‘out of position’ within the holding channels of the transport flask. INS was quick to point out that safety was not compromised and that it was matter of some of the 28 HLW canisters being loaded into the wrong channels of the transport flask.
After consultation with its overseas customers and Sellafield, and having obtained clearance from the UK’s Department for Transport, the Atlantic Osprey was allowed to leave Barrow on the evening tide of the 12th March. Arriving four days later in Vlissingen (16th March), some Dutch HLW canisters were also found to be out of position within the transport flask.
CORE’s spokesman Martin Forwood who attended the liaison meeting said: “Sloppy operational procedures in loading the HLW transport flasks at Sellafield must clearly be to blame – to the huge embarrassment of INS who had previously insisted that these ‘first ever’ HLW returns from Sellafield to overseas customers would be conducted flawlessly. This was not the case and, with a further 10 years of similar HLW return shipments ahead, we again urge that such shipments are abandoned ”.
Whilst tracking the Atlantic Osprey’s progress from Barrow to Vlissingen on one of several marine monitoring websites, CORE and other groups noted that for several periods on the 3rd and 4th days of a voyage that should have taken little more than 2 days, there were repeated alterations of ship’s course and speed, the latter reduced to a speed of just 2 or 3 knots on courses that clearly showed the Atlantic Osprey ‘time-wasting’ closer to the English coast than to that of Holland.
By way of explanation, INS told the Committee that ‘slow steaming’ is commonly used in order to achieve an agreed arrival time at destination – a practice conspicuous by its absence over years of ship monitoring by CORE and others.
Martin Forwood added: “Swanning about aimlessly for hours close to the busy English channel shipping lanes with a highly radioactive cargo on board cannot be reconciled with the accepted principle that delivery of such materials is effected without undue delay.. I don’t believe we’ve been told the whole truth about this part of the voyage, and further questions need to be asked”.
With the HLW return to Holland already described by Sellafield as ‘being completed safely and successfully and to schedule’, CORE’s original suspicions about the movements of the Atlantic Osprey’s were heightened by an INS refusal to provide answers to CORE’s Freedom of Information (FoI) request on the voyage. Instead, INS took the unusual step of invoking the little-used Section 22 of the FoI Act – a delaying tactic which allowed them to publish their own version of events first at a place and timing of their own choice.