Unwilling or incapable of learning from the UK’s disastrous MOX fuel experiences, yesterday’s Government approval for the re-use of plutonium as MOX fuel is branded by CORE as a ‘decision made in the dark that yet again puts the proverbial cart before the inevitable nuclear white elephant’.
With a preliminary decision taken by Government even before its Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) public consultation on plutonium management had started, it nevertheless promised that final approval for the re-use option was conditional on a range of major issues – including costs and demand for MOX fuel – being tested and resolved ‘before the UK Government will be in any position to take a final view (emphasis added).
CORE’s spokesman Martin Forwood said today
It is inconceivable that any major issues have yet been sufficiently tested since the end of the consultation to allow a final view now to have been taken. This is clearly a decision made in the dark and one that has absolutely nothing to do with the open and transparent selection of plutonium management options and everything to do with capitulating to pressure from an industry still smarting from the embarrassing failure of the Sellafield MOX Plant SMP which has so far cost the taxpayer £1.4Bn’
The weakness of its case for the re-use of plutonium as MOX fuel has undoubtedly prevented the Government from going ‘the whole hog’ and putting its weight behind the construction of a new MOX plant at Sellafield or elsewhere in the UK. In its document published yesterday ‘Management of the UK’s plutonium stocks – A consultation response on the long-term management of UK-owned separated civil plutonium’ the Government however suggests that the construction of a new MOX plant could begin around 2019 with the first MOX fuel being fabricated in 2025.
Martin Forwood added Given the Government’s admission that producing MOX fuel in a new plant has no commercial merit but simply provides a way of putting plutonium ‘beyond reach’, squandering a further £3Bn of hard-pressed taxpayers’ money into a plant that will directly support just 600 workers is an obscene nonsense’.