Sellafield: Britain’s Nuclear Power Secrets | Inside Sellafield | Timeline

Sellafield Britain's most controversial industrial site the massive complex looks somewhat out of place against a background of rural beauty but it was here on the edge of the Lake District in a remote corner of northwest England but British scientists learned the production techniques for manufacturing plutonium that most feared of manmade substances since the 50s it has played a key role in providing Britain and the United States with the essential ingredients for atomic weapons and become an integral part of the nuclear power program of a number of countries over the years the name of the site has changed from Windscale to Sellafield and control moved from the Atomic Energy Authority to British nuclear fuels along the way mistakes have been made there have been intense arguments over the way the plant has been run and expanded and accusations of secrecy against this background British nuclear fuels declined to defend the company's past record preferring to talk only about current projects Harold bolter worked at the heart of bnfl for nearly 20 years of this controversial period resigning in 1994 after being cleared of financial misconduct he contemplated suicide over the way he felt he'd been treated but instead he spoke out about his experiences within the company about the successes and failures and about the self-imposed secrecy he claims was paramount in the attitudes of managers inside sellafield [Music] the activities of nuclear sites like this are now viewed by many with suspicion because of past links between civil and military programs but in the middle 50s there were no such fears memories of the Second World War was still strong and it was the terrifying power of the atom which had beaten the Japanese but in 1955 a conference in Geneva told how atoms could be put to work for peaceful means Britain was amongst the leaders in exploiting this exciting new technology and the future it promised to deliver would free those with access to it from the growing power of the Middle East oil States the initiative of President Eisenhower a great deal of information was given out to the to the rest of the free world as we called it know in those days and it looked as though nuclear power was going to be almost the savior of mankind here for people of my generation for whom the atomic bomb had been such a horror was the classic case of swords into plowshares this was how we were to use this terrifying power for peaceful purposes it was safe it was cheap almost free fuel and it was peaceful and what I learned by experience over the years and I was responsible for the British nuclear program for eight years longer I think than any Minister in the world was it isn't safe it doesn't treat three and a half times the cost of curl and it isn't peaceful the whole thing was launched for the bomb and was about the bomb there may have been a naivete among scientists and politicians alike about what the future held for nuclear power but it did little to diminish their enthusiasm plans were laid for a huge number of nuclear power stations around Britain consisting of Magnox plants like those had called a halt and chapelcross a few miles away on the other side of the Solway estuary advanced gas-cooled reactors and for the technology which excited the scientists most the fast breeder spent-fuel would be reprocessed after several years of use and the plutonium recovered burned in the fast breeder reactors the result would be to extend by an enormous amount the useful life of the world's known uranium supplies and reduced the cost of the electricity produced so attention was turned to building a reprocessing plant which would do with a job it felt that we needed the plutonium one for the weapons program but also for the fast reactor system which was really the end objective of everybody the nuclear industry and so that was the first attraction the reprocessing then it became apparent that countries like Japan just building up their programs were also in need of plutonium for fast reactors and there was an assumption then that worldwide nuclear power would take off and that uranium prices would shoot up with everybody building reactors all over the world and that it made economic sense to recycle uranium if we could do it as well so there's an apparent need for recycle uranium and plutonium there was an early hiccup in the plan after an additional plant was added to what had previously been used as a military processor an accident contaminated 30 workers and the building was permanently shut down but managers continued to argue the logic of reprocessing it made sense as part of what was seen as Britain's nuclear future it seemed that overseas business was there to be won a business which could generate profit from utilities faced with a choice of what to do with their own spent fuel so they came up with a plan to build a new process which would cash in on this perceived worldwide demand for a thermal oxide reprocessing plant early two options one is to reprocess and recycle and they're listed directly dispose of spent fuel the UK concept has always been reprocessing and recycling and that's really what selfing is all about it's a reprocessing plant certainly if we go back to those days and countries both in Europe and in Asia we're looking to develop nuclear power programs and we were part of that there were customers who were talking to us about the services that they could see they would want in the future and that was really what created the the the momentum for looking at Thorpe so that we could provide a recycling service both to domestic customers and to those overseas well the full plant was never seen in narrowly economic or financial terms thought was one part of quite a complex structure and it was very much near the heart of that structure in which nuclear power had to do with producing plutonium as well as producing power the plutonium would either have a military need or it will be recycled back into a new generation of fast breeder reactors which in the end have never proved commercial and for those in the industry reprocessing fuel was somehow so much at the heart of the whole enterprise that it somehow wasn't even relevant to conduct a conventional economic analysis because it was one of the foundations of the whole edifice and they were worried that the whole building would fall down if they didn't have reprocessing so it was just one of those inevitable things that you had to do to push the whole nuclear enterprise forward up to this stage there had been general support for the concept of nuclear power in Britain but in the middle of the decade something was to happen which would begin to change the view of many British nuclear fuels were convinced their plan for Thorpe had popular backing and were confident of getting the go-ahead to build it without encountering the delay imposed by a public inquiry but then the Daily Mirror ran a front-page story which would forever change the public perception of what sellafield was about moreover it brought previously muted objections to the forefront and opened the doors for discussion of nuclear policy by laymen who had no specific scientific expertise in May 1975 while I was working for Friends of the Earth I wanted to prepare a piece of basic information that would be accessible to anybody who was interested in nuclear issues because the nuclear industry had always been able to pretend that only qualified experts were entitled to make pronouncements about policy on nuclear issues and this seemed to me to be outrageous special pleading a nuclear reactor is not more complicated than a color television set and people are always willing to express opinions about the social and political impact of color TV even if they don't know how the set works and you should take the same approach to a technology like nuclear power so I prepared a four-page tabloid which was given away in enormous quantities by Friends of the earth and on the front page of that tabloid I had one of the two articles headed Windscale to be world's radioactive dust in question mark and five months later The Daily Mirror picked up this dustbin for isn't put it on its front page there's a twin scale the world's nuclear dustbin and the dustbin phrase has been there ever since and I was at home and being a morning paper John this was still in bed with my small daughter bought the Daily Mirror up and showed me it and said that her mother thought I had to look and it said Windscale was the plot as the site was then called the world's nuclear dustbin merry exmas should I really go to take this jokes I had two weeks still to run on the Financial Times I hadn't quite joined bnfl so my first concern was what did this mean and what would it mean in terms of politics and then the company partly couldn't believe what had happened because newspapers until then have been praising the company for getting the business in effect that story been turned on his head what to some journalist was at UK triumphs in terms of business became an ecological disaster in the terms used by the Daily Mirror despite the mirrors story bnfl could still have escaped a public inquiry had they not shot themselves in the foot in spectacular fashion b38 the building which housed the pons holding spent fuel from Magnox reactors had sprung a leak a hundred gallons of water a day was flooding into the soil around the building it had been built twelve years earlier and had a capacity of 70,000 gallons but no one knew for how long the leak had been going on when these radioactive discharges were eventually discovered cellar fields managers were faced with a critical decision should they come clean about the leak at such an important time when the cabinet was discussing the building of Thorp or keep quiet about it for fear of influencing the political decision they kept quiet it was to prove a fateful decision which forced the public inquiry and undoubtedly caused bnfl and the taxpayer tens or even hundreds of millions of pounds the site was aware of this at the site management itself it was aware of this but obviously didn't wander off the boat while the cabinet was looking at the proposition the SOB should be built without a public inquiry but to be fair to them they also felt it was a relatively trivial radioactive materials was getting into the ground and they did tell some of the regulators of the day in the region about it reasonably early a week or two into it and nobody rang morning bells then here's only when it reads politicians through rumors from the side that I was approached by John Cunningham them MP for what he's now Copeland and white have to say what do you know about a lake and I knew nothing and neither did the chairman or chief executives of that day I was told by bnfl that they had an offer of reprocessing fuel from Japan we had supplied one reactor to Japan and the argument was we had the equipment to do it it was very profitable in any way it was part of a non-proliferation program and the matter went to the cabinet was considered by the Cabinet I think on the 24th of November and two months earlier there had been a leak of a hundred gallons of waste and that was known to be an affair at the time they didn't tell me I went to the cabinet and presented their argument for considering the thought project in ignorance of a leak which had it been known certainly don't they would have set the whole argument into a totally different frame and that was another example of my confidence in the being shaken not just that they didn't tell the truth but that they were able to instruct my officials not to tell the responsible minister who had the job of keeping Parliament to the fabric info not to tell the minister what they knew to be the case and I was absolutely horrified by that I had given instructions I had to that every incident in a nuclear station however small might be a little radioactivity on a glove was to be reported to me and I published and when I was misled that really shook my confidence in them now it was it important it was certainly important enough for it to be a public inquiry a big delay and possibly some lost business but that silo strangely enough is still in use it's not been emptied yet and that's one of the dilemmas with old plans at Sellafield Antillean developer a ways of not only decommissioning these old buildings but dealing with the material that the debris of decommissioning through a waste repository on there's no point in taking it down and so that silo is still still there it's still being used and there is that contamination still in the ground in June 1977 a protracted public inquiry into the proposal began in nearby White Haven presided over by Lord Justice Parker it lasted a hundred days and attracted representation from a broad spectrum of interested parties foremost amongst them was Friends of the Earth the group had waged a year-long campaign against Thorpe a campaign they said had done much to achieve broad publicity for an inquiry which became inevitable after the b38 Fiasco they entered the fray with high hopes and were utterly convinced they had a strong case against the new plant we knew how committed the official establishment was to going ahead with this idea but the further we investigated it and the more we studied the facts of the case and the more information we gathered internationally about experience elsewhere the more convinced we were that there was a very very strong factual case against the plant and we thought we were being given a forum to put that case at the Windscale inquiry for British nuclear fuels the Windscale inquiry was a door to the future Thorpe was the company's flagship their key project for the rest of the century and there was a genuine belief that the nuclear world would rush to take advantage of the new reprocessing facility the inquiry had to be won at all costs he was seen as very important and 30 today it was a long inquiry it was 100 working days and now that looks quite small after what happened it sighs well that was a long inquiry and a lots of strategic issues defence issues non-proliferation issues as well as economic environmental health and safety were covered at that inquiry which was frankly quite an experience I spent all but about three days of those 100 there and it was an education frankly to listen to what was going on and what was being argued at the end of it I was in no doubt the benefit would get approval but trying to be like will Patterson the friend's death he was in no doubt that it would be infused the arguments that we presented were led by a senior and experienced QC and the cross-examination that we carried out on a number of British nuclear fuels witnesses in effect if you read the transcript simply demolish the arguments that they had presented but if you go back and read the final report by the inspector Justice Parker you will see no sign whatever either of the evidence that we introduced or the cross-examination we carried out Parker simply accepted be NFL's assertions as made effectively in their opening presentation and trailed them in the report as though they had passed all across examination and this the report itself was frankly a travesty of the inquiry at the end of the inquiry we thought including our QC we thought we had made a case that was unarguably strong so it's obviously a well conducted inquiry in the sense that you didn't know what the inspector and his Assessors were going to say then you hoped and eventually it was a very strong report in favor I think that was right based on the knowledge then bolter says that if they had known in the 70s what they now know in the 90s they probably wouldn't have built the plant well in the 1970s we told them but they not only ignored us they misrepresented the evidence which had been presented to them if you go back and look at the case that Friends of the Earth presented at the Windscale inquiry you will see that it has subsequently been vindicated pretty much comprehensively from beginning to end in fact we were conservative we didn't actually state that things would turn out to be as unpropitious as they have proved to be bnfl told Lord Justice Parker that the split of home and overseas fuel to be handled by Thorpe would be 50/50 it was an important issue after the fears raised by the Daily Mirror's headline the previous year but in reality about 70% of the reprocessing and thorpes first decade will come from outside the UK and there's doubt the inquiry would have given the go-ahead for the plant had this been known at the time I think we would have had problems getting approval for the plant because one of the planks of the objectors arguments was that this was going to make sellafield into the world's nuclear dustbin they're going to take spent fuel from overseas with all these nasty things in it and we were going to just handle it at Sellafield and I think it was a 70/30 split people would have said started have more sympathy with that argument with a 50/50 split and the argument this was actually helping the British taxpayer by keeping costs down it was much easier to sell so building work got underway on a project which would cost nearly 3 billion pounds the legacy of b38 had cost the company dearly but at least its flagship project was underway however the troubles for Sellafield management were far from over in December 1978 the discovery of a new much more serious leak of highly radioactive liquor called into question their attitudes and procedures and began a process which would lead to a threat to close the plant down the problem lay in this building be 701 which had been decommissioned 21 years earlier but a pipe carrying waste to a tank from which it had once been tapped off for experiments at the UK atomic energy authorities plant at Harwell had not been capped for years the liquid waste had been overflowing from a sump designed to catch any spillage and now lay several feet deep in the building no one could say for sure how long this had been going on nor exactly how much had seeped through to the soil outside and it was worrying that this new radioactivity had only been discovered accidentally was surveys to determine the extent of pollution caused by the earlier be 38 leak were being undertaken three months went by before the minister responsible was informed and perhaps fortuitously for bnfl a general election was imminent that came very late in my period as a minister but I think it was in December 1978 they discovered that 2,200 gallons of unconcentrated wasted leaked into the subsoil it wasn't brought to my attention to a March that was 2 or 3 months later when they discovered I do not know in the election of 79 I was up in Liverpool campaigning and I called the nuclear inspectors to see me to find out the truth and I wrote a manuscript letter because I wasn't in my office - Sir John Hill saying work on this is to stop and he came to see me in my house where we're sitting now on the 28th of April and I had another example of what went on I had sent the manuscript letter after all even in manuscript a letter the mr. as a letter to state or Minister I found my officials in rhaggy map and had the letter withdrawn and returned to the office without my authority and at that stage it was too late I mean I was a lame-duck Minister Lee a few more days before the defeat of the Labour government but even so the Prime Minister intervening mr. Callaghan from Downing Street to say that no reference was to be made to the military aspects of it which was a confirmation of what had happened but it was really outrageous that such a thing could occur and when I said to Hill what can you do about he said we would have to build a new plant to do it the then chief executive of the company described it as the building they forgot and he said they shouldn't have and of course he was right it shouldn't have been forgotten I think that it did put a very strong warning to manage that the site that that could something like that could not be allowed to happen again well it hadn't quite been forgotten about I mean it was covered by all the procedures but the procedures weren't actually being carried out that was a cause for concern and the second cause for concern was with the excuses that were made by some of the management at the time about the business I mean it was suggested to the nuclear installations Inspectorate that no one had had any reason to suppose that the liquor that everyone knew was in the store was in fact radioactive now well maybe maybe they suspected it might have been rainwater or something and possibly it could have been but you really can't live in the presence of so much radioactive liquor and just take it for granted that some liquid you knows in a particular place is harmless and they did that what many regarded as the biggest disaster at least for public relations came in 1983 when a discharge from the sellafield pipeline released 50,000 Curie's of radioactivity into the Irish Sea at the time this was within the annual discharge limits today it would be a very different story the accident happened during an annual shut down for maintenance a mixture of radioactive liquid and solvents got into the sea tanks the last point before discharge through the pipe when it was discovered an initial attempt was made to recover the mixture through a small return pipe but the process would have taken a week and held up completion of the maintenance task an effort was made to discharge the lighter contaminants from the top of the tank whilst containing the radioactive crud at the bottom in the event it didn't work Roy paling who was then the head of the site ranked me on Friday evening it said he could actually say a slick of the solvent on the sea which has unusually calm and I think this is part of the problem had it not been such a calm sea it's probable that solvent and radioactive low-level radioactive material would have been dispersed in the sea and we'd never know but in fact we did know because it appeared on the beach leading in the end to a government advise for people not to make unnecessary use of the beach which i think is perfectly fair in the circumstances it lasted six months and then of course to a great deal of public concern thank you feeling that we damage local in the state the tourist industry and again the chairman and chief executive myself weren't told for a week so we were pretty irritated to what the incident did show it was a certain how should I put it a certain lack of seriousness I think with which some of the operative people at Sellafield itself were actually taking the business of protecting the public from radioactivity it was six months before the Department of the Environment allowed a large section of West Cambrian shoreline to be reopened to the public two years later bnfl was fined ten thousand pounds at Carlyle Crown Court for polluting the beaches the regulators also insisted on an audit of the company's procedures and threatened to close them down if they didn't clean up their act within a year but then in 1992 came an incident which involved a potential criticality an explosion when plutonium sprayed from a pipe inside a reprocessing cell be NFL's argument that it was simply an anomaly was dismissed and it was classified as a level three incident on the international scale of seven it was clear that if we've been reprocessing military fuel at that time and we weren't the nature of a plutonium would have made even the amount of plutonium was bigger and more serious possible event so that in that sense that was a serious incident and was judged so on the international scale was no operate in the serious incidents even though it wasn't an incident if you say an incident only when something happens this was a very much of what if incident but a very serious what if incident it had been planned that Thorpe should begin operations at the beginning of 1993 but in August 92 a public consultation was undertaken on the draft authorization which would allow the plant to be commissioned Treasury officials met a delegation from Greenpeace at the end of September and was said to have been impressed by a report from the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex which was highly critical of the project the world had changed a great deal since the case put forward at the Windscale inquiry some 16 years previously and there was a great deal of interest in the new analysis of thorpes viability basically the project was never going to make very much money over the first ten years it was going to make a very low rate of return maybe one or two percent on assets which was surprisingly low for what is essentially a monopoly endeavor and at the same time there were some real risks especially in the area of decommissioning the plants in other words bnfl had made the assumption that they could wait fifty years before decommissioning after the plant closed down and I only set aside enough money to take care of decommissioning on that assumption if decommissioning were necessary a few years after closed down then even if they did make as much money as they thought during operation that money would easily beaten up and more by the extra bills for decommissioning that they hadn't provided for during the plant's lifetime the delay in commissioning cost British nuclear fuels more money some suggest as much as a hundred million pounds and the company was deeply concerned that their flagship project might yet fall at the last hurdle the effect on the business and on the economy around sellafield would have been disastrous oh I think it was very much the major concern for us I mean obviously we'd had a lot of people dedicating their whole career to the to the building and seeing through into operation of a major part of B NFL's business so yes of course I think everybody involved in that challenge was very mindful of the fact that here we were at the completion of Thorpe ready to serve our customers needs and at the last minute having to get over a final hurdle to make sure that we could proceed through to commissioning eventually the authorizations were granted and there was a collective sigh of relief at bnfl but amongst the environmentalists there was a bitterness but as previously their arguments had been in vain I have a feeling that these processes both the public inquiry which Friends of the Earth were very actively involved in back then and the judicial review which we took Greenpeace took to try and stop the opening one said having built that the the establishment has these processes organized so that if they've decided something should happen it will even when they know it's wrong now that was clear by the time thought was built everyone you talk to privately inside government Treasury about the environment wherever even probably one or two people inside bnfl and certainly plenty inside the nuclear industry privately off the record would say nobody would do this now nobody would start it if we were starting today but it's there you know and it's a bit like Concorde and all these other things no future blind alley but we've got this far down it we might as well smash into the wall and do ourselves a serious injury and that's what Thorp is so I don't think much would have made any difference actually but the debate over Thorp is far from over it's economics are uncertain as the validity of the arguments in favour of reprocessing continues to come under pressure the ambitious plans which have been in place for nuclear power around the world have been scaled down or abandoned the fast breeder program in the UK has died a death the need to reprocess rather than store spent fuel is being challenged and uranium prices far from increasing have actually declined and now some are suggesting that the contract signed with the newly privatized UK utility are not nearly as secure as British nuclear Jules would like to believe them to be not at all we've seen that with between Germany in France where they're quietly trying to change reprocessing contracts into what are in effect storage contracts they're trying to finesse it fudge it because they've got to deal with French public opinion but they're not secure and the idea that these are contracts commercial contracts these are intergovernmental agreements they're not a commercial about it and they can be changed by governments it's a valid point that uranium prices have not gone up as they were anticipated but I don't think that is the key factor in utilities and governments deciding whether they will pursue the recycling option of course economics are very important they are a very important element of electricity generation by whatever means but in the case of nuclear power what we are able to provide utilities with is a service that takes away their spent fuel from their reactors and we treat it and return the products of reprocessing back to them to be reused of course we have to provide an efficient and economic service and we believe we do that we do that because we still have our customers supplying us with their spent fuel for us to provide that service but there are growing doubts about the performance of Thorp and its ability to deliver doubts which British nuclear fuels have declined to refute with hard evidence thorpe was designed to cope with up to a thousand tons of spent fuel a year that's a theoretical maximum assuming everything works perfectly and there are no delays but to account for normal production techniques the price of thoughts reprocessing was costed on the ability to handle just 600 tons leaving a generous head room for any problems that might be encountered this was later increased to 700 tons a year however there is no evidence performance has come anywhere near this quantity to date and the company continues to talk of the ongoing commissioning of Thorpe started up two years ago and they chief executive that devil churn that said that he hoped in two years to have it up to something like full production whatever that is because it's supposed to do seven thousand times over 10 years but obviously it builds up and then could fall away possible this should build up but they start has been concerned I think within the company too it certainly didn't have a good first year its second year it's improved but it's still not up to that optimum output figure as far as I understand it and so they still work and they're still talking at bnfl of commissioning the plant and I would certainly have expected to be over after two years the last figures released suggested just a hundred and twenty tons have been sent to the shearers the machines which chop the fuel elements into small pieces but that's only at the beginning of the reprocessing cycle no figures are available for fuel which has completed the process and bnfl store what he refuses to release them the exact figure we are not giving and the reason for that is that we don't want to be in a position of being challenged as though we were sort of producing chocolate bars and you said you would produce 27 and you've only produced 25 therefore there must be something wrong what we are committing ourselves to is as I've said before a safe and quality process for commissioning the plant and we still have the same robust confidence that the plant in its first 10 years will safely reprocess the 700 and the 7,000 tonnes its contracted to reprocess but the logic of be NFL's argument is difficult to understand the need to ramp up production levels comes not from outside pressure to prove that Thorpe works efficiently but from the 1000 ton a year limit the plants design imposes the NFL is contracted to reprocess 7,000 tons through Thorpe in ten years but if it takes until the end of the third year to reach full throughput Thorpe will have to work the remaining seven years of its first decade dangerously close to its maximum capacity the design throughput of Thorpe is about a thousand tons a year when we thought that you would have around six thousand tons in 10 years that was a very conservative estimate and as the design progressed it became clear that we could get 7,000 turns out of it and I'm confident that with though we will and you can see this from the way the plant is performing now the the key parts of the process we're now confident will perform at that rate we have tested every part of the plant so it is in that sense fully functional but our current chief executive who was appointed only a few months ago has really reiterated and reinforced the key message of his predecessor and that is safety first in all our operations and that has been taken into the operation of thought wholeheartedly and the priority is is to undertake a safe and quality commissioning program the time element is not a priority for bnfl that would suggest that despite assurances the period of time during which the first batch of fuel will be reprocessed could stretch beyond the 10 years presently allocated and if that were to happen it would bring about a recasting of the entire economics of the thought plant well when I did my analysis I assumed at least in the base case that bnfl would get the throughput of 6 700 tonnes a year which they wanted it's certainly the case that in the first two years they've done much worse than that whether that affects the fundamental economics of the project or not isn't yet clear if it's just a minor postponement maybe it won't matter if on the other hand it means the plant is never going to work as well as they first thought that's another kind of economic threat which frankly I didn't pay much attention to in the original analysis the Sellafield secrecy is helping to maintain the controversial nature of Thorpe with analysts unable to calculate its success for lack of hard evidence the plant which has been the subject of bitter battles for 20 years has yet to prove that the confidence expressed in it by British nuclear fuels and by government has been well-placed the argument against reprocessing is becoming stronger and there are those who believe the whole concept of generating cheap electricity by nuclear means has been nothing more than a sham since the beginning you see we were told so many things first of all as I said we were told it was cheap it doesn't when they began to privatize the nuclear power industry they discovered that it was three and a half times the cost of coal now there is a staggering differential particularly when you remember that the pits were closed by mrs. Thatcher on the grounds that they were an economic they were only a third of the cost of nuclear power secondly nuclear powers gradually you know being phased out I remember talking to O'Leary who was former travel of the federal Power Commission in Washington on my last visit as a minister and he said somebody who absolutely staggered me at the time he said you come back 100 years who have been a nuclear power in the world anyway and the Americans had had the 2000 2000 program 2000 nuclear reactors by the year 2000 or canceled not all but very very few could be built so we were left and we would tell those a shortage of uranium capcity untrue there was a ring monopolistic ring that kept the price of uranium high the price of uranium fell so at every stage it was fraudulent and the reason that it was put was because of the bomb and then ultimately of course the lutonium from our nuclear weapons from our so-called at us for peace states were going to America to make the bomb so I think the people are slowly waking up to that but certainly the whole environment the perspective of people saw nuclear power in 1977-78 had been completely changed and that has had a major effect there been a major factor in altering people's perceptions about the thought project after it had been built in commission one of the arguments used against the concept of reprocessing is that it creates stockpiles of plutonium a man-made radioactive element with a half-life the time taken for its radioactive emissions to decrease by half of a quarter of a million years opponents said should be left in situ as a small percentage of the used fuel extracted from nuclear reactors at the end of its useful life rather than separated off in the reprocessing plant by the turn of the century the stockpile of civil plutonium will exceed that used for military purposes and it's becoming an embarrassment for countries around the world Britain's Magnox Power Station's alone have produced more than 32 tons in the past 30 years plutonium was to be used in fast breeder stations but the world's latest attempt to build one at manju in Japan suffered a setback when the coolant containment failed it's now thought unlikely reactors like these can be made to work effectively for decades to come but it was on the basis of a host of stations like these that much of the case for civil reprocessing was made obviously in the context of the plans to build a series of fast reactors it was essentially couldn't couldn't do it any other way but when the first reactor and this was happening in the in the 70s and we were very well aware of this was disappearing further and further into the future before he would become economically viable then people did begin to ask questions well why we reprocessing and some people saw reprocessing as an essential form of managing the spent fuel as a an integral part of the waste treatment procedures whereas others argued and I think that was one of them one of the earlier ones to argue that simply storing the spent fuel until you knew the what the position would be was was a more sensible approach than than to continue to reprocess for collapse of the fast-breeder program which would have used a fuel comprising 20% plutonium has led to a major rethink of policy but now bnfl is building a plant which will manufacture a new type of mixed oxide fuel known as machs containing a much smaller proportion of plutonium a similar plant in Germany has been abandoned before commissioning because of opposition from the Greens so 150 tons has been contracted to go to German reactors from Sellafield of the UK's civil reactors just one will be able to use MOX sighs will be mixed oxide fuels is simply the nuclear industry or British nuclear fields clutching at straws Thorpe was developed because it produces separated plutonium that separated plutonium was meant to be used in the fast breeder the point is the fast breeder doesn't work Brina fell now have lots of plutonium nobody really wants that because it's cost a phenomenal amount of money to store it it has secured security implications because you know plutonium is the fuel for bombs so now they're looking for a if you like a reverse justification well we can develop this other project are these other products which will use the plutonium but if it is safer to keep plutonium in feel if it's better to have the plutonium we've already separated out turn it into mixed oxide feel you have to ask the question why extract the plutonium in the first place our customers are pleased to be provided with that service it's a growing demand we are building a plant here the French are just in the final stages of commissioning their plant and are also now talking of extending that plant there's one in Belgium which is also probably going to expand its production to meet the demand from reprocessing customers to return they're separated products into a very usable form to generate further amounts of electricity but it's hard to see the justification for mocks on economic grounds alone it's not an attractive proposition according to German nuclear experts its cost is between four and five times that of uranium fuel rods and it's not they say popular on the international market as a commercial enterprise I'm not sure it makes an awful lot of sense because even if the plutonium is regarded as a free good mixed oxide fuel is more expensive than conventional fuel but as part of a long-term strategy to dispose of plutonium and with some suitable public subsidy because it's hard to see a mixed oxide plant making money then it could be one sensible disposal route as a way of getting rid of plutonium there seems little more than a political argument in favor of MOX and from some quarters at least a strong proliferation argument against it was Tony Benn sensitive to the nuclear dustbin label who came up with the idea of returning reprocessed plutonium and waste to the country of origin but the plutonium and uranium in mixed oxide fuel could be separated by relatively simple means giving ready access to the material from which atom bombs are constructed ironically the largest amount of black-market plutonium discovered in Germany last year was as part of a MOX fuel mixture in the early days we used to be contented in the thought that plutonium derived from several fuel elements because of the high burner was unsuitable for nuclear weapons but in I think it was 1962 the American demonstrated the civil plutonium could indeed be made into into into a weapon so there's a proliferation worried about this so this rather clever idea which which we've been thought he had will not be coming the nuclear despot has a very unfortunate effect on on on the proliferation issue and indeed if you have to reprocess foreign fuel and by far the most sensible thing to do is to then hang on to the plutonium and for that much of the high-level waste in this country because there's nobody better or more secure than berries nuclear fuels for looking after this plans for a permanent storage facility are now being put forward an investigation is underway into building an underground repository at Sellafield for some waste products created by the nuclear industry an inquiry into an application by Nayak's to carry out seismological testing is due to report later this year but it's a sign of the state of Britain's nuclear policy but even should it get the go-ahead and the site found to be satisfactory it will only store intermediate level waste and until highly radioactive waste is dealt with in an acceptable way the danger of further leakages from the sella field site will be ever-present problem at Sellafield which cannot be solved until and unless that wastes much of it in liquid form some of it nobody quite knows what it is is got into solid form and disposed of that's absolutely necessary and anything which delays or prevents that actually does contribute to an unsafe situation it's actually mind-boggling this legacy what this society has done in a very very short period of time is crater waste products which completely transcends all human experience you know if the dinosaurs discovered radioactive waste or nuclear power we would still be dealing with some of the products that they would have created that's if you like the timescale we're talking about some radioactivity is very short-lived it will decay away in a short period of time but in a million years say you build a nuclear waste dump at Sellafield in a million years there will still be radioactive waste which she's still with dangerous in their dump and that is really the nature of the scientific task that no arexx face they have to be able to come up with a safety case that can talk about that sort of timetable it's fair to say that British nuclear fuels has enjoyed a checkered history it inherited plant from the Atomic Energy Authority which was under maintained and had been designed with little or no regard to the difficulties which would be faced at the time of decommissioning [Music] the military purpose for which the site had been developed continued to cast its shadow of a cellar field for some time having engendered a secretive nature amongst many who worked there even in dealings with their own managers and directors some of the mistakes and errors of judgment made in the 70s and 80s would be likely to be met with a very different response now and without doubt did much to damage the public image of an industry of which so much had been promised they have damaged the industry in the sense if only in the sense that each love literally it's a now a very expensive industry and a lot of the spend on plants to bring down discharge to the sea or to surveillance of old plans and so on has been forced on something certainly no mistakes if you don't do enough about your problems promptly whether it's in terms of communication or dealing them if you delay it in any way the ultimate cause will be greater is my experience and the increasing cost then of the science operation concerned the customer who again went round whether publicly or privately to journalists saying some nasty things about reprocessing and that didn't help attitudes there were some fearsome roles within the industry about repressing costs and I guess they'll still go on [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 108,747

Rating: 4.6788616 out of 5

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, nuclear power, nuclear waste, nuclear reactor, nuclear accident, inside sellafield, nuclear power plant, nuclear power plant explosion, nuclear powered icebreaker, nuclear powered cruise missile, nuclear power plant meltdown, nuclear powered car

Id: gKg1l-yiEG8

Length: 50min 25sec (3025 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 24 2019