On the day that British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) relinquished ownership of the Sellafield site and its operations to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), the site’s unions threw a spanner in the NDA clean-up plans by calling for more reprocessing and associated commercial work.
Interviewed by BBC Radio Cumbria on the 1st April, Sellafield’s GMB convenor Peter Kane said that whilst he believed there were still 8-9 years of commercial work on site ‘we are hoping, as a trade union organisation, to increase that to more commercial work’.
A spokesperson for CORE said today: “The unions have clearly learned nothing from THORP’s predicted failures and seem determined to stand in the way of West Cumbria’s progress towards a cleaner future. Unlike BNFL’s customers who have already pulled the plug on reprocessing as an unnecessary, uneconomic and polluting operation, the unions should stop believing in the tooth fairy and, in the best interests of their members, aim for a more realistic future”.
The NDA currently plans to continue reprocessing until existing contracts have been completed – around 2010-2012. The plans, which will see a further half a decade of unnecessary nuclear waste production and radioactive discharges to the environment, have already been condemned by CORE and others as being wholly incompatible with the NDA’s remit to clean-up.
CORE’s spokesperson added that they would be challenging the NDA every step of the way over continued reprocessing and plutonium fuel production. “How can you claim to be cleaning up when you are deliberately adding to the mess ? Whilst the unions are clearly a lost cause, we expect much more from the NDA – as will the taxpayer who will have to pay all the clean-up costs”.
Already facing one European Commission investigation into whether its finances constitute illegal ‘state-aid’, the NDA now faces a second EC investigation after a complaint from the Nuclear Free Local Authorities (NFLA) that the NDA had ignored European environmental laws in the preparation of its first Annual Plan for Sellafield. The European Directive on Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) requires such an assessment for any plan which is likely to have a significant impact on the environment.