Blogposts tagged 'Sellafield'

It's official: nuclear recycling plant is a staggering waste of taxpayers' money

Posted by jossc - 7 April 2009 at 3:48pm - 18 Comments

Sellafield

Backers of the controversial MOX plant at Sellafield, which promised to turn toxic waste into a useable fuel that could be sold worldwide, had claimed the plant would make a profit of more than £200m in its lifetime, producing 120 tonnes of recycled fuel a year.

But an investigation published in today's Independent newspaper reveals what the government has been trying to keep secret - that technical problems and a dearth in orders has meant it has produced just 6.3 tonnes of fuel since opening in 2001.

Since building work began in the 1990s the plant has absorbed over £1 billion in public subsidies - money which could have been far better invested in developing renewable energy projects.

Article tagged as: mox fuel, nuclear power, plutonium, sellafield

Nuclear waste company says, "Whoops, some of our files are missing"

Posted by jamie - 17 February 2009 at 2:12pm - 0 Comments

Greenpeace volunteers protest about plutonium shipments between the UK and Japan

Back in 1999, Greenpeace was protesting about plutonium shipments destined for the Mox plant at Sellafield. Now the plant may have to close © Greenpeace/Sims

In the 'funny if it weren't so scary' category we have the advert which ran last week in the Whitehaven News, the local paper for west Cumbria where Sellafield is to be found. As reported in the Guardian at the weekend, LLW Repository Ltd - the company which has recently taken over managing the site - have found there are significant holes in records detailing what radioactive waste was dumped in the repository at nearby Drigg; so they're appealing for people who worked at Sellafield in the 60s, 70s and 80s to rack their brains and fill in the gaps. 

Article tagged as: mox fuel, NDA, nuclear power, nuclear waste, sellafield, videos

More cracks appearing in nuclear waste plans

Posted by jamie - 26 August 2008 at 3:41pm - 0 Comments

Some unsettling news appeared in the Independent over the weekend, which revealed that an Environment Agency report has said that containers at Sellafield (where most of the UK's waste is stored) may not be as stable as was thought. The document effectively destroys Britain's already shaky disposal plans just as ministers are preparing an expansion of nuclear power.

Article tagged as: CoRWM, energy, gordon macKerron, nuclear power, nuclear waste, sellafield

Big fat bribes for anyone willing to live with nuclear waste

Posted by jamie - 12 June 2008 at 3:01pm - 0 Comments

We've known for quite some time that the government's preferred solution to that nagging problem of all the nuclear waste currently lying around the place is to dump it in a big hole in the ground. Nice. However, they've had trouble finding anywhere in the country which has been willing to live with this waste bubbling away beneath their feet but now they've come up with the perfect solution: bribery!

Article tagged as: bribery, NDA, nuclear power, nuclear waste, nuclear waste white paper, sellafield

Black Tuesday blights Brown's nuclear vision

Posted by jossc - 29 May 2008 at 11:32am - 8 Comments

Major ongoing problems at Sellafield have been hidden from the public

Sellafield: major ongoing problems have been hidden from the public

Yesterday, Gordon Brown felt compelled to go on the record to announce that the UK needs to not only maintain but to increase its nuclear power capacity. And yet the nuclear industry is not exactly hale and hearty because, let's face it, it's been a terrible week for the poor dears.

Article tagged as: british energy, decommissioning, NDA, nuclear power, nuclear waste, sellafield, sizewell

Sellafield produces very little of anything - apart from headaches for its operators

Posted by ben - 3 March 2008 at 5:58pm - 0 Comments

Sellafield

More gloomy news from Cumbria, where yet another pall of tenebrous darkness has descended over the hapless nuclear monolith that is Sellafield. This particular cloud comes in the form of the hugely expensive and much-vaunted MOX Plant, whose job it is to turn reprocessed material (mainly in the form of plutonium and depleted uranium) into new MOX fuel.

In theory MOX, which stands for mixed oxide, can then be exported overseas and used to power some reactors in countries like France and Japan. In theory, that is. Because in practice it turns out the plant isn't producing much of anything. Apart from headaches for its operators.

Article tagged as: environment agency, malcolm wicks, mox fuel, NDA, nuclear power, nuclear subsidies, sellafield

A day trip to Sellafield

Posted by ben - 13 December 2007 at 2:53pm - 2 Comments

Earlier in the week the nukes campaign team were lucky / unlucky (delete as appropriate) enough to be taken on a tour of Sellafield, the UK's biggest nuclear site. And it was a bit of an eye opener.

It's a massive site, covering about 4km2, which meant we couldn't see everything in one go. So we spent most of our time in the vitrification plant watching high level waste being mixed with molten glass and poured into huge milk churns prior to storage (this stuff is so dangerous that if you placed a flask of it in the centre circle of a football pitch and tried to walk to it from the dug out, it would kill you before you reached it), and then in the hugely expensive Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP).

Article tagged as: nuclear power, nuclear waste, reactor safety, sellafield

Looking back at the Windscale nuclear disaster, 50 years on

Posted by bex - 10 October 2007 at 12:18pm - 0 Comments

Today is the official end of the government's nuclear "consultation" (more on that coming soon). It's also the 50th anniversary of the world's second biggest nuclear disaster - at Windscale, now known as Sellafield, in West Cumbria.

Jean McSorley, a nuclear consultant, has written about the disaster in today's Guardian. It's powerful stuff, so I'm posting an extract here:

 

"I opened the gag-port and there it was - a fire at the face of the reactor. I thought: 'Oh dear, now we are in a pickle.'" Those were the words of the late Arthur Wilson, the instrument technician who discovered the Windscale fire on October 10 1957, in No 1 of the twin plutonium piles. It signalled the beginning of the world's second biggest nuclear reactor accident.

Article tagged as: nuclear disasters, nuclear power, reactor safety, sellafield, windscale

Haven't we got enough already - why is more nuclear waste heading our way?

Posted by jossc - 1 October 2007 at 12:56pm - 0 Comments

Despite the close attentions of coastguard ships and helicopters, not to mention an anti-terrorist task force, 30 Greenpeace activists in inflatable boats intercepted a British Nuclear Group ship this morning as it headed towards Sweden to pick up a cargo of nuclear waste. The intense level of protection around the Atlantic Osprey meant that its arrival was only delayed by an hour or so before docking at the nuclear facility at Studsvik, where it will pick up 4.8 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel, due for reprocessing at Sellafield's MAGNOX plant.

Article tagged as: BNG, magnox, nuclear waste, sellafield, sweden

British Nuclear Group court case - transcript and sentence

Publication date:  5 April, 2007
On 16th October 2006, British Nuclear Group, the operator of the massive Sellafield nuclear complex, was in the Crown Court in Carlisle to face sentencing over an accident that led to the shut-down of the THORP spent nuclear fuel reprocessing plant.

The case, brought by the Health and Safety Executive (North West) centred on the events that led up to 83,000 litres of highly radioactive dissolved spent fuel leaking into the area beneath a tank in the reprocessing facility.
Download the report:
Article tagged as: BNG, nuclear accidents, nuclear power, nuclear power plants, reports, sellafield
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