UK signals abandonment of nuclear fuel reprocessing

comment from New Scientist, 23 May 2007

Amidst all the palaver over the UK government's energy policy paper backing a new programme of nuclear power stations on Wednesday, one significant shift has so far been missed. Buried away on page 204 is a change that will give anti-nuclear campaigners some crumbs of comfort.

"The Government has concluded," it says, "that any nuclear power stations that might be built in the UK should proceed on the basis that spent fuel will not be reprocessed." This is the clearest statement so far of ministers' intention to abandon the decades-old policy of reprocessing uranium burnt in reactors.

All the fuel from Britain's first and second generation nuclear stations has been chemically separated into uranium, plutonium and radioactive waste at Sellafield in Cumbria. Only spent fuel from one station - the pressurised water reactor at Sizewell in Suffolk - has not been reprocessed.

But the new government energy paper says that reprocessing "raises particular concerns about the creation of separated plutonium". It also points out that the private sector "has made no proposals to reprocess spent fuel from many new nuclear power stations."

Reprocessing at Sellafield has been dogged with problems, with the main plant shut down since April 2005 following a leak of 83,000 litres of highly radioactive nitric acid. A plan to restart the plant earlier this in 2007 had to be postponed when problems were discovered with downstream evaporators.

The government's decision to end reprocessing will not be welcomed at Sellafield, though neither the plant's operator, the British Nuclear Group, nor its owner, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, wanted to comment.

The abandonment of reprocessing would represent a small victory for the anti-nuclear lobby which has long targeted Sellafield's operations as polluting and unnecessary. But Greenpeace points out that it will leave the government with new problems to solve - like where to store and how to dispose of the spent fuel. That looks like more bad news to be buried in the future.

Comments

[John Busby]

The end of spent fuel processing would mean the abandonment of any chance of adding fast breeder reactors to the UK fleet. The bred gain in plutonium has to be separated out from the U-238 "blanket" and incorporated in the FBR fuel.

[Denis Gibbs]

Dear Sirs

Although it is a bit late for Sellafield, it might be useful to understand that even a flood starts with a single drop of water. If that drop of water is noted as being somewhat unusual at the time, then it is possible that the flood can be averted.

Patents held by Before the Event Ltd enable a single drop of water to be detected, and then alarms etc activated.

Any electrically conductive fluid can be detected - including radio-active fluids.

What a pity that nobody seems to care - although our website has been "up" for 3 years, not a single enquiry has been made from "nuclear" sources.