from The Observer, 21 June 2009
Britain’s ageing nuclear power and weapons plants have been plagued by more than 1,700 leaks, breakdowns and other mishaps over the past seven years, according to a secret report by the government’s chief nuclear inspector, Mike Weightman.
The report, released under freedom of information legislation, reveals the catalogue of incidents and accidents that have confronted the UK safety watchdog, the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII), as it struggles to cope with a growing workload and a severely depleted staff.
The NII faces “major challenges” in ensuring that old nuclear plants are run or dismantled safely at the same time as checking that new plants are safe to build, Weightman says. There are problems “across all areas of existing nuclear plant”, including Sellafield in Cumbria, Aldermaston and Burghfield in Berkshire, and reactors around the country.
With relatively fewer inspectors than any other nuclear-powered country in the world, the NII has to police the safety of 39 nuclear sites across the UK, some of them dating back more than half a century. It is also having to assess foreign reactor designs proposed as part of the government’s new nuclear power programme.
In January this year, Weightman put a 37-page report to the board of the NII’s governing body, the Health and Safety Executive. Marked “restricted”, it lays bare the crisis that is afflicting the regulation of the British nuclear industry.
The report discloses that between 2001-02 and 2007-08, there were a total of 1,767 safety incidents reported at all Britain’s nuclear plants. About half of them were subsequently judged by inspectors to have been serious enough “to have had the potential to challenge a nuclear safety system”.
They included an accident at Sizewell A nuclear power station in Suffolk in January 2007, when cooling water leaked from a pond containing highly radioactive spent fuel. The operator was not prosecuted for breaching safety rules, according to the NII’s official investigation, partly because NII resources were “stretched”.
In May 2007, a manhole at the Dounreay nuclear plant in northern Scotland was found to be contaminated with plutonium. A series of other incidents occurred at Sellafield, including a fault with a trap door meant to provide protection from highly radioactive waste in September 2008 and the contamination of five workers at a plutonium fuel plant in January 2007.
According to Weightman’s report, some of Sellafield’s radioactive waste treatment facilities were suffering from “operational fragility”. There was also a “lack of progress in decommissioning the highly hazardous redundant plant” including buildings numbered B29, B30, B38 and B41.
Another “major issue” arose because advanced gas-cooled reactors at Heysham in Lancaster and Hartlepool in County Durham had to be closed, costing their operator, British Energy, £1.6 billion in lost electricity generation. The reactors’ boiler units had to be modified to prevent “very significant” releases of radioactivity, the report says.
The NII has had to deal with such problems despite an acute shortage of experienced staff. It is 26 inspectors short of the 192 it needs to regulate existing facilities, and its ratio of inspectors to nuclear plant is a third of the international average, far below that of Mexico, Japan, Spain, Canada and Korea.
To assess new reactor designs for the UK, Weightman says he needs a further 36 inspectors, to bring the complement up to 228 by summer 2011. But he has “struggled” to recruit new staff and the “lack of build-up of resources to date” could jeopardise the government’s target date of 2017 for deploying new reactors.
“Britain’s nuclear inspectors are facing serious problems with serious implications,” said the independent nuclear engineer, John Large. “Some of these incidents were worrying and potentially disastrous.”
“We already have evidence that their staffing crisis is compromising their regulation of nuclear safety,” he added. “Without a strong and effective regulator, the risk of a large release of radioactivity increases.”
But John McNamara, the spokesman for the 175-member Nuclear Industry Association in the UK, argued that the industry’s safety record was “second to none”. The incidents had all been reported by operating companies and investigated by the NII.
This was “evidence of a robust, highly professional and transparent regulatory approach”, he said. “A thorough review into nuclear regulatory resourcing as part of the government's policy on delivering new nuclear build is currently underway.”
After this story appeared, the Health and Safety Executive released an electronic copy of Mike Weightman's report, which can be downloaded here (1MB pdf). It also published a response statement, which can be downloaded here (36 KB pdf).
All a desperate attempt by regulators to empire build & by Luddites to drive up the cost of nuclear. You know perfectly well that nuclear is easily the safest method of making electricity, far moreso than windmills.
Posted by: Neil Craig | 23 June 2009 at 01:33 PM