Sellafield - Windscale is the largest nuclear fuel storage dump, and nuclear weapons as well as fuel processing facility in the world — resting in the seaside on a backdrop of Cumbria in beautiful Lake District of England. lake District is famous for its lakes and its fells, and its associations with the early 19th century poetry and the writings of William Wordsworth and the Lake Poets. Here is the best national park, the loveliest hard mountains of England and the gorgeous Bassenthwaite Lake, and the many meres, waters, tarns and reservoirs comprising this land that seems to remain unchanged since ”creation times”. It is a place of immense beauty, cragginess and epochal storms that define the landscape. A place of earth power unrivaled and palpable. And it is also home to Sellafield – Windscale power…
This is where the vast nuclear reservation rests and where a small part of this vast complex is now producing MOX nuclear fuel and is also a former nuclear electricity generating site [operating for 50 years until 2003], close to the village of Seascale on the coast of the Irish Sea.
And today the conservative government sealed this place’s fate for the next hundred years, because in an act of greenwash they took a ”show horse” approach to the nuclear problem. And they did this without the wisdom of the old and without factoring in the lessons learned from Fukushima as they seek to extend Sellafield’s lease on Life forever. In essence they said that when the stars are aligned right and at some distant point in the future, they will close completely the small MOX nuclear fuel plant but leave alone the much larger and much feared Sellafield – Windscale’s other nuclear reprocessing fuel plants and the vast nuclear dump — and by the way, they will also built a range of new nuclear reactors for electricity generation there starting in 2021 and going on for another fifty to seventy five years thereafter.
And by the by, do you know that the largest nuclear fuel wast depot is in Sellafield – Windscale on the surface and unprotected? The largest nuclear dump of it’s kind in the world. Period. And it will be there where it is for practically forever. For an eternity? Bet you didn’t know this is the largest nuclear repository anywhere and that the government is not shutting it down but instead is going to enhance it with a huge complex of new nuclear reactors for electricity production. Something that big hasn’t happened in this site since the Windscale piles explosion and fires in the biggest nuclear accident of it’s time.
And somehow the media says that we should be thankful for the closure of the MOX plant and they hail it as a green success.
But we hail it as a greenwash PR success and nothing more. Because by announcing the uncertain future closure of the MOX nuclear plant, the Tories are trying to mask the fact they licensed to build the biggest new nuclear factory in the site. And this is no uncertain wish or considering to built at a later date, but a firm built out plan already in the throes of execution. And they go ahead with this new vast nuclear plant – Fukushima be damned.
And of this foolishness the UK government is guilty, because ever since the 11th of March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that crippled Japan’s nuclear industry’s behemoth in Fukushima, the winds of dread have blown home to the memories of the Windscale explosions and the two headed sheep of Cumbria after the nuclear accident here.
So we have to question the real motive of the government’s decision coming through DEFRA and NDA when they said that Sellafield Mixed Oxide (MOX) plant in Cumbria, UK, is to close “at the earliest practical opportunity” as the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority as was announced today. Is the real motive to obfuscate the new nuclear reactors fleet deployment? Is this a sideshow, when the reality is elsewhere? Or is this the ultimate effort at Greenwashing?
And history is instructive for those facing decisions without consulting the past and the lessons learned. Green-washers have to be particularly careful where to tread here:
Because all the way back with the creation of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) in 1954, and with the first of four Magnox nuclear reactors becaming operational in 1956 there have been more than six hundred accidents at Windscale – Sellafield nuclear complex. Most of them were kept completely secret because of the State Secrets Act, but the radiation leaked affected people, livestock and the environment and was felt and reported worldwide. And in 1981 after the biggest nuclear accident back then, and in an effort to obscure the facts, Windscale was named Sellafield. As if this were enough to cure all ills.
Since its inception as a nuclear facility Sellafield not only has been the site with the greatest number of nuclear accident worldwide, but has also been the site of the greatest number of reprocessing operations. Operations which separate the uranium, plutonium, and fissionable products from spent nuclear fuel to weaponize it or to use it as fuel of direct uranium or plutonium and MOX and other fuel mixes through various methods. The main processing is for uranium that can then be used in the manufacture of new nuclear fuel, or in applications where its density is an asset. The plutonium can be used in the manufacture of mixed oxide fuel (MOX) for thermal reactors, or as fuel for fast breeder reactors, such as the Prototype Fast Reactor at Dounreay etc. These processes, including the associated cooling ponds, require considerable amounts of water and the Irish Sea is already vastly irradiated because of this. Same as the sea of Japan near the Fukushima nuclear plants. No fish are harvested there…
Wonder why fishermen avoid this expanse of the Irish sea although the fish all glow and are easy to see even in the dark of night.
The real issue here is that on the 18th of October 2010, the British government announced that Sellafield was one of the eight sites it considered suitable for future nuclear power stations and on the following year, 23rd of June 2011, the Tories, confirmed plans to build a huge new complex of nuclear reactors at Sellafield, to be completed before 2025.
So the reality is the nuclear plant at Sellafield – Windscales is growing and will be with us till eternity. It will also be producing electricity for the next fifty years after 2025, and so the MOX plant’s closure is just a cunning diversion. A simple sideshow is this announced future closure. Supposedly, because it’s only customer is the vastly-troubled Japanese nuclear industry, currently in a programme of plant shutdowns. The shutdown of nuclear plants in Japan is continuing because the continued seismic activity threatens its stupidly located nuclear power station installations. Almost all of them are located in seismic faults and near vital waterways and the tsunami prone seas. And for us instead of shutting down the nuclear electricity plants like those of Japan’s and also placed in seismically prone areas near the water, we claim to close a breeder reactor…
Woopty Do. Break open the champagne and blind yourself with the cork.
Still Sellafield is so important that when a spokesman said plans to close the MOX fuel reprocessing plant are related to the Hamaoka Japanese plant, which is instrumental in sealing the MOX plant’s fate, we had to question this. Hamaoka is situated on the sea coast some 200 kilometres south of Tokyo. Very similar to Sellafield – Windscale plant itself. But the interesting bit is that the Hamaoka nuclear power plant straddles not one but two major geological faults and has been described by seismologist Katsuhiko Ishibashi at Kobe University as a “kamikaze terrorist waiting to explode”. And so is the Sellafield straddling the geological formation under the Irish sea.
And here the similarities end. Because the Hamaoka plant is not likely to reopen ever again but the Sellafield plant is set to be built out with new reactors.
In Hamaoka back in May, wary of the risk of another magnitude 8 quake hitting, the Japanese government ordered it to close for an indeterminate period, while a massive sea wall is being built. Yet the Sellafield – Windscale plant is to be enhanced with a range of new nuclear reactors for electricity without any seawall defenses.
Apparently in response to the problem the UK-NDA did the opposite of the Japanese government. Instead of shutting down the whole lot, it chose to go for a PR show and close what it doesn’t need anymore and built far more capacity in it’s place. So the British government said that it will close at a future date the tiny and market useless MOX plant, keeping quiet about the new reactors is planning to install there as soon as possible.
Apparently the British government is unwilling to burden the UK taxpayer with the minimal costs of running the MOX plant when it has no foreseeable chance of making any nuclear fuel sales any time soon as if they made any money ever from this black hole… And of course we all know that the 97% of the cost of nuclear plants is the initial built out and construction phase of it and the operations simply incur the fuel processing costs and amortize these construction costs over time. And so it is for the new nuclear reactors scheduled for Sellafield that will cost upwards of 11-14 Billion quid without the externalities. And incidentally they will not use that type of MOX fuel anyway… so who needs the MOX reprocessing plant?
Fact is that the Sellafield – Windscale MOX plant never sold anything. Not a single load of fuel was ever shipped out of there… Not a single pound was paid by a customer to the MOX plant. No business was transacted… This was a white elephant of the first degree. A real pink bird with big floppy ears. A real Dumbo. And the further sad reality is that the MOX nuclear plant technology is in question in terms of safety itself, so no new customers are to appear on the horizon ever. So why was it built in the first place at the cost of Billions of Pounds? One has to wonder where were the nuclear regulators, the bean counters and the British government accountants back then when they decided to built this folly?
It’s ironic that this mixed-oxide fuel plant that has cost the taxpayer over £1.5 billion since it was commissioned in the early 1990s, and it was operated by the government-owned Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), when it was set up to create mixed-oxide fuel for use in nuclear power plants, with its chief future customers the Japanese nuclear industry’s Fukushima complex. The MOX plant was built in 1996 and became operational in 2001, generating Mox fuel, which is made from plutonium and uranium and although it attracted large quantities of plutonium waste to the Sellafield site for reprocessing, from around the world, it never shipped a pound of it back. So now they have to store all this hazardous waste for eternity too. The NDA said ”it would continue to store Japanese plutonium safely, and further develop discussions with the Japanese customers on a responsible approach to support the Japanese utilities’ policy for the reuse of their material.”
Holly Cow – what a load of bull coming out of this government’s mouth.
And the river of BS keeps giving, because the UK government has an interest in continuing the folly by insisting that MOX is still viable as reactor fuel. Because if ministers were to admit that MOX was not viable, the government would be forced to acknowledge that the Tens of Billions of pounds worth of plutonium that are stored here would have to be recognised as a liability on government balance sheets. However the pretence that MOX customers will somehow materialize or that another MOX nuclear reactor plant may be built in the future, allows the plutonium to be reckoned a zero-value asset and they don’t have to deal with it as the high level human existential threat that it represents sitting pretty in the fragile cooling ponds, polluting the water supply and the adjoining Irish sea.
And still, the MOX plant is a very small part of the Sellafield – Windscale nuclear complex site. The sprawling nuclear complex employs over 10,000 people in the Magnox and Thermal Oxide reprocessing plants alone and the MOX plant only employs another 500 people. That gives you a view of the relative scale. So the ten thousand who work at the Magnox and Thermal Oxide reprocessing plants have their hands full and even perform a raft of decommissioning operations, including the handling and storage of various grades of nuclear waste – some of it awaiting a future deep geological disposal site – to be found yet.
Sellafield’s operators and the UK-NDA hope some of the nuclear fuel stored there is going to be transported elsewhere but without this elsewhere site even been dreamed of, let alone being found yet — the Sellafield – Windscale legacy nuclear waste and the plutonium for MOX reprocessing along with the wastes from the new nuclear energy plant to be built yet — will be with us for a very long time. So the government ”conspiracy plan” is that the new reactors coming online will somehow legitimize the inaction in responding to the crisis of Fukushima or decommissioning anytime soon — by claiming the vast Sellafield complex as a currently productive nuclear reservation. Even though the location, the economics and the potential for disaster spell large, that they are all wrong.
Seems the UK government hasn’t learned much from the lessons Fukushima, Chernobyl and Windscale have to offer.
Yet history has a way of teaching those who refuse to learn. They get to repeat it…
Leaders are responsible for this but what of the people?
Because history requires them to relive the lesson to their horror and to the horror of the people they are responsible to lead…
So feel the 500,000 homeless people of Fukushima prefecture who have been irradiated and have no hope of ever returning to their homes because their leaders never learned the lessons of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl and even Windscales and exposed them to the costly horrors of the Fukushima’s disaster.
And let this be a warning to Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg and their nuclear greenwash dreams for these can rather easily turn to nightmares of nuclear disaster horrors affecting us all…
Nobody wants to relieve the Windscale disaster. Time to shut it down fully and not start building anew.
The good news is that the troubles of the MOX plant in the UK mirror those of the MOX plants being built elsewhere and especially the ones in America and prove that this change of policy in the UK is the simple response of the bean counters to the diminishing use of MOX fuel globally. Remember a few years back when the nuclear lobby was promising safety and solution to all of our energy fears based on the MOX reactor nuclear cycle? Seems they lied about that too. And the built out of the MOX plant in Virgina is completely useless too. Especially useless as far as economics are concerned. So long for the public dough and the investor’s capital for this pink elephant. Plutonium based nuclear fuel is going down in use and in value…
To complete the point of deception, and prove it’s culpabiity, the UK government insisted that the closure of the Sellafield Mox plant had “no implications” for the proposed construction of several new nuclear power stations in the UK. Any such new nuclear power plants would be unlikely to be of the kind that could use Mox as a fuel, because the enormous costs involved in such reprocessing make it uneconomic to do so.
Germany is shuttering all of it’s nuclear plants. Switzerland is facing out it’s plants also. Austria is out of it and Italy follows suit. Japan is crashing out of nuclear power by default with only a third of it’s reactors operational now and government plans to move towards renewables and away from nuclear. The other two thirds of the Japanese nuclear plants — representing 20% of the electricity production of Japan — are shuttered and no plans exist to restart them because of earthquake risk, unstable technology and local community opposition.
Still the economy of Japan is humming along and the impact to society is negligible because grid efficiency, better management of the base-load and savings of energy along with other targeted controls & efficiencies built in the system, overcompensated for this loss of 20% of the electric power base load. Nobody felt a thing and certainly nobody missed the idling nuclear plants. So much for the scare tactics of the nuclear industry using PR to scare governments into building new nuclear plants. maybe the UK and old England can learn something valuable here about building new nuclear plants and their value to the energy system…
We are an intelligent species and ought to learn from our mistakes to improve our lot constantly in the inexplorable walk towards progress. Proof of that is Japan’s complete about face and turnaround in it’s Energy policy. A new policy, away from nuclear energy is in the books now. Keeping in mind that nuclear was the largest component of it representing at times between 30-50% of all the country’s base-load. Further proof of the dismal performance of nuclear energy is the sacking of the Japanese Nuclear regulators today, as scapegoats of the old [as of yesterday] policy that led to the totally preventable Fukushima nuclear disaster.
Yours,
Pano
PS:
I’ve said it before and will say it again: Nuclear Energy is a pipe dream.
Nuclear electricity production doesn’t make any sense economically at any price per kilowatt hour.
It doesn’t even make sense, when you factor in the public subsidies. As a business case nuclear power is a dismal failure.
This means that when we finance nuclear dreams, in reality, we are wasting public resources and people’s treasure to support a business black hole.
It means that we are fueling an economic nightmare of immense proportions…
I leave it up to you to tell me what it means on all other fronts…
Especially in light of the Fukushima disaster and the resulting plight of half a million people left homeless and irradiated…
It’s amazing how quickly these nuclear dreams turn into the most horrible wake-up in terror and scream, falling down kind of nightmare.
Go figure.
