[ RadSafe ] Radioactive leak hits Britain in pocket

[Gerry Blackwood]

http://www.smh.com.au/news/World/Radioactive-leak-hits-Britain-in-pocket/2005/05/09/1115584909836.html

Radioactive leak hits Britain in pocket

By Paul Brown in London
May 10, 2005

A leak of highly radioactive nuclear fuel dissolved in concentrated
nitric acid, enough to half fill an Olympic-size swimming pool, has
forced the closure of a reprocessing plant in northern England.
The highly dangerous mixture, containing about 20 tonnes of uranium
and plutonium fuel, has leaked through a fractured pipe into a huge
stainless steel chamber that is so radioactive it is impossible to enter.
Recovering the liquids and fixing the pipes at the Sellafield plant
will take months and may require special robots to be built and
sophisticated engineering techniques devised to repair the £2.1
billion ($5.1 billion) plant.

The leak is not a danger to the public but is likely to be a financial
disaster for the taxpayer because income from the plant, calculated to
be more than £1 million a day, is supposed to pay for the clean-up of
redundant nuclear facilities.
The closure could hardly have come at a worse time for the nuclear
industry. Britain is struggling to meet its target of cutting
greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent of 1990 levels by 2010 despite
a substantial program of wind-farm construction, while generating
capacity will also be hit by the rundown of some of Britain's
coal-fired power stations.

The decision on whether to build a new generation of nuclear power
stations is among the most sensitive the Prime Minister, Tony Blair,
faces at the start of his third term in government.

A leak on Sunday of a briefing paper to ministers on the nuclear
option revealed that the contribution that new nuclear capacity could
make to cutting greenhouse gases had not yet been considered because
of opposition from the Environment Secretary, Margaret Beckett.
On Friday the British Nuclear Group, a management company formed to
run the Sellafield site, held a meeting with the government safety
regulator, the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate, to discuss how to
mop up the leak and repair the pipe. The company has to get the
inspectors' approval before proceeding.

A problem at the plant was first noticed three weeks ago, when
operators could not account for all the spent fuel that had been
dissolved in nitric acid. Remote cameras scanning the interior of the
plant found the leak.

Although most of the material is uranium, the fuel contains about 200
kilograms of plutonium, enough to make 20 nuclear weapons, and must be
recovered and accounted for to conform to international safeguards
aimed at preventing nuclear materials falling into the wrong hands.
The Guardian




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