BNFL’s much vaunted Sellafield MOX Plant (SMP) has again let down its first customer Nordostschweizerische Kraftwerke (NOK) of Switzerland by failing to deliver a MOX fuel order for the Beznau nuclear power station in time for the station reactors’ annual refuelling outages this summer. Delays to the plutonium commissioning of the plant have ruled out any possibility of the Swiss order even being manufactured, let alone delivered.
A similar failure in the Spring of last year led to BNFL having to subcontract at least two SMP orders to rivals in France and Belgium. Government estimates have shown that last year’s delay and loss of contracts alone will have cost SMP 10’s of £Millions in lost revenue. The financial and contractual fall-out from this year’s failure is likely to be catastrophic for BNFL and SMP in terms of further lost revenues and damage to customer confidence.
Ongoing research by CORE shows that the delays to actively commissioning all stages of SMP’s production line have resulted in not one single MOX fuel assembly being produced even though active commissioning of the plutonium fuel production line started over two years ago, in April 2002 when the first plutonium dioxide powder was introduced into the plant.
A CORE spokesperson said today “ This MOX cock-up must be a huge embarrassment to BNFL. It will ring alarm bells with Government Ministers who controversially gave the go-ahead for the plant despite environmentalists’ predictions that the plant was economically and technically unviable. With its reputation already in tatters, the kindest thing is to put SMP out of its misery and close it down right away “.
SMP’s production line consists of three main stages – pellet , fuel rod and fuel assembly production. Quarterly reports issued by the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII) show that the first two stages have been under active commissioning with plutonium for some time. Recent NII confirmation that active commisioning of the third stage – where fuel rods filled with MOX pellets are bundled together to form completed fuel assemblies – had still not started, means that SMP has now literally missed the boat for producing and delivering MOX fuel to Switzerland.this year.
A final hurdle for SMP, once MOX fuel assemblies have eventually been produced, is the active commissioning of the retro-fitted MOX Export Facility where completed fuel assemblies will be packaged and stored prior to delivery to customers.
CORE added “ The active commissioning of both the fuel assembly production stage and the Export Facility will take months rather than weeks. No MOX fuel can leave Sellafield until this is completed and approved by the NII. European customers may now think SMP is a lost cause, and the plant’s future is likely to be questioned by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) which takes over Sellafield operations next year.
Notes:
SMP was built at a cost of £470M with an eye to filling most of its order book with business from Japan.
With the £470M construction costs conveniently ‘written off’, the plant was assessed by Government appointed consultants in 2001 to have a Net Positive Value of just £216M – a value that relied heavily on Japanese business being secured.
Today, no Japanese interest has materialised and SMP is left with relatively small orders from customers in Switzerland, Germany and Sweden, some of whom are facing tight delivery schedules because of their reactors’ final closure dates.
Japanese utilities, still smarting from the 1999 scandal when BNFL-manufactured MOX fuel arrived in Japan with falsified quality assurance data, still appear to lack confidence in BNFL’s ability to produce MOX fuel. One utility, Kansai Electric, has recently published its intention to sign a contract for MOX fuel with COGEMA in France.