Sellafield nuclear waste still a clear and present danger

The situation at Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria is dire and poses significant risks to people and the environment. Historic neglect, poor planning and a failure to minimize hazards – that’s the history of decommissioning the site of Britain’s first nuclear accident in 1957 when the plant was known as Windscale.

For 50 years, whoever has been in charge (and that has changed frequently), has failed to develop any plan for safe decommissioning and long-term waste storage. The whole sorry (and dangerous) saga is detailed in a new report from the National Audit Office (NAO).

The timetable is slipping further and further, and the reality is that it is a job that simply can’t be done within the current framework of government negligence and lying.

The NAO says the operators still have no plan for storing waste and have no idea how much it will cost to maintain it safely for hundreds of years until it ceases to be a danger.

The current budget for decommissioning is put at £67bn. But over the last ten years, projected costs have increased almost £1bn every year, so the figure is meaningless.

There is enough waste to fill 27 Olympic-sized swimming pools on the site and some of it is being stored in buildings and containers in a poor state of repair.

There are 240 nuclear buildings, and so far only 55 have been decommissioned. Out of 13 contracts, 12 have been of poor quality and not value for money, the NAO found. Dr Ruth Balogh, of West Cumbria and North Lakes Friends of the Earth, commented:

"The UK's failure to deal with highly hazardous nuclear waste at Sellafield is a national scandal that poses a significant risk to local people and the environment. The government has completely ignored the urgent need for interim measures to deal with this radioactive waste. We shouldn't build any new nuclear reactors if we can't deal with the radioactive mess that's already been created."

But the government is not listening. They have just signed a deal with Hitachi to build nuclear reactors at Wylfa in Anglesey and Oldbury in Gloucestershire. Hitachi bought out the German-owned Horizon consortium, which withdrew from the project earlier this year.

In the longer term, Hitachi says it wants to build six reactors on existing nuclear sites where power stations are coming to the end of their life.

Their “boiling water” system is new to the UK and risk assessments would normally take years. However, the government may find ways to cut the assessment period, and with the new planning regulations, people living round the sites will not be able to delay projects with legal challenges.

Talking up the deal, claiming billions in investment and thousands of jobs, David Cameron was entirely silent on where the waste will go when these new reactors run down after 60 years. They don’t even know where they are going to put the waste from those currently reaching the end of their lives and almost ready for decommissioning.

Efforts to bribe local authorities to agree to become waste storage locations, initiated by New Labour, have failed. Only Copeland, in west Cumbria has agreed. It is the district round Sellafield and is one the UK’s poorest areas, partly as a result of the devastation caused by playing host to the UK’s biggest nuclear hazard. Some 70% of the current waste is already in temporary storage at Sellafield.

Energy and climate change secretary Edward Davey claims that Hitachi bring with them “decades of expertise, and are responsible for building some of the most advanced nuclear reactors on time and on budget”. Yes, that includes their participation in building the reactors at Fukushima!

The government boasts that none of the new nuclear power stations will get any public subsidy – but fails to mention the cost of storing the waste. It is the ultimate in short-termism, in profit-driven madness and abject failure of governments to put people and the environment ahead of the big energy corporations when they plan our energy future.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

Risks ignored as Obama leads nuclear charge

President Obama fired the starting pistol for a rush to nuclear power in the US when he announced this week that his government will offer $8.3billion in loan guarantees for two nuclear reactors to be built in Georgia. This puts the US in line with other big powers, where the stampede to build a new generation of nuclear power stations is on.

China has 14 reactors under construction and 35 more planned. India has six under construction and 23 planned. Even Russia, where you would think the safety lesson might have been learned after Chernobyl, has eight under construction and eight more planned. And of course, New Labour recently gave the go-ahead for 10 new plants in the UK.

The result of the expansion programme will be a massive increase in uranium mining, with new operations already being opened up in Namibia and Kazakhstan, which has tripled its uranium output over the past four years and will soon overtake Canada as the world’s biggest producer. Just as with oil, the easy stuff is taken first and then dirtier processes employed to get at the harder to reach ore.

There is no recognition on the part of governments or the nuclear industry of the extensive health and environmental risks at every stage of the nuclear life cycle. As the American organisation Physicians for Social Responsibility says, uranium mining exposes miners and their communities to high levels of carcinogenic radon gas:

“The effects have been so devastating in the United States that the Navajo Nation, upon whose lands sit one of the largest uranium reserves in the world, has outright banned the practice, even as they struggle with crushing poverty. Radio nuclides routinely released in nuclear reactor operations have been linked to developmental problems, birth defects, reproductive problems, cardiovascular disease, leukemia and other cancers. Epidemiological studies of children living near nuclear reactors show a positive association between leukemia and proximity to nuclear reactors.”

We have experience of that in the UK with the identified clusters of childhood leukemia found around Sellafield in Cumbria in the 1980s. There is no safe way of disposing of waste, which also carries significant health risks, particularly associated with leaching into water supplies.

A scandal exposed this week shows the blatant disregard for human health of the nuclear industry. The French newspaper Liberation published photographs of what appears to be nuclear waste from French EDF reactors simply lying in the open, on the ground in a Siberian town to which access is forbidden.

EDF energy, part-owned by the French state and the world’s biggest nuclear operator, admits it is exporting waste to Russia and that only 13% of what it sends comes back reprocessed. What happens to the rest? No comment. EDF is the likely candidate for constructing new plants in Britain.

The question governments can’t answer is why they are doing it? The idea that nuclear is clean and green, and a contribution to reduced carbon emissions is rubbish. The result of extracting the uranium and the billions of tons of cement needed to build all these huge plants will be massive CO2 emissions. It is unlikely any future savings in emissions would offset this early surge over the whole life of a reactor.

A study by the Rocky Mountain Institute, which campaigns for rational use of the world’s resources, says that if every dollar spent on nuclear power were invested instead in energy efficiency measures, it would produce seven times greater reduction in carbon emissions.

But the corporations are not going to get profits from energy efficiency – and people using less fuel means smaller profits for them. The shadow governments of the corporations are pulling the strings for energy planning. For an alternative way to meet energy needs see our Manifesto of Revolutionary solutions.

Penny Cole
Environment editor