Under a cloak of heavy security, 14 tonnes of vitrified highly radioactive waste was delivered to Barrow’s Ramsden Dock today by rail from Sellafield and loaded onto the nuclear cargo ship Pacific Sandpiper. The shipment is due to leave Barrow on the high tide early tomorrow morning, Thursday 21st January.
The glassified High Level Waste (HLW), held within 28 canisters inside one transport flask is destined for Japan – a 6 week voyage whose route has not yet been confirmed. Under contracts signed over 30 years ago, the HLW has been produced by the reprocessing of spent reactor fuel from Japanese and European customers. Despite producing such waste for decades, this shipment is the first ever to be returned by Sellafield to overseas customers and is some 15 years later than originally projected.
Contracts signed after 1976 required reprocessing wastes of all levels to be returned to customers. In a bid to remove the logistical nightmare and costs posed by having to return all wastes, that contract requirement was successfully watered down by the industry, with Government approval, to returning only the smaller volume of HLW – with the significantly larger volumes of foreign Intermediate and Low Level Wastes (ILW & LLW) being dumped permanently in the UK. Under this policy of ‘waste substitution’, customers will receive an extra amount of HLW calculated to be of ‘radiological equivalence’ to the ILW and LLW they have abandoned in the UK.
Observing at the docks today, CORE’s spokesman Martin Forwood said: ‘The high security surrounding today’s shipment is testament to the dangers posed by this highly radioactive material and the unwholesome global trade in which the nuclear industry is immersed. Sellafield needs to wake up to the harsh reality that today’s world and its oceans are a significantly more dangerous place than they were 30 years ago when the contracts were signed.’
Today’s return shipment is the first of many such transports scheduled for returning overseas HLW over the next 10 years – with Japan expected to receive a total of up to 1000 HLW canisters at the rate of around one shipment (4 transport flasks) from Barrow docks each year. Like all nuclear states, Japan has no final disposal site for the HLW and must store it instead at its Rokkasho reprocessing facility.
Future shipments will be not be made on the Pacific Sandpiper which, as the oldest ship (launched 1985) of the Pacific Nuclear Transport (PNTL) fleet and already at its 25 year sell-by date, is due for retirement. The next HLW return is destined for Holland and is expected to be made on the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority’s (NDA) ship Atlantic Osprey based at Workington docks in the near future.
Martin Forwood added: ‘These highly contentious shipments warrant an urgent re-assessment by Government and industry and, if necessary, contract renegotiation. Abhorrent as it may be to keep HLW in the UK as well as other foreign wastes, it might prove to be the least bad option in this increasingly unpredictable and volatile world.’