A cargo of highly radioactive nuclear waste set sail for Japan last night, after a breakthrough agreement that will cut Britain’s stockpile of high-level waste by almost 40 per cent over the next decade.
After years of planning, a programme to repatriate all 925 tonnes of foreign atomic waste from Britain to Japan and four other countries began yesterday.
Under heavy security, 28 steel canisters of waste, each weighing half a tonne but sheathed in 100-tonne steel flasks, were moved by rail from the Sellafield plant in west Cumbria, where they have been held in temporary storage since the 1990s, to the port at Barrow-in-Furness. There they were loaded on to the Pacific Sandpiper, a custom-built, double-hulled ship that will be protected by armed guards throughout the six to eight-week sea journey to the Far East.
The initial cargo represents the first shipment of 1,850 canisters of foreign waste held at Sellafield that are due to be returned to Japan, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and the Netherlands by 2020.
The precise sea route, the timings of departure and arrival as well as details of the security measures have all been kept secret to deter piracy or nuclear terrorism, but campaigners said that the shipment highlighted the huge safety risks of transporting such hazardous materials around the world, a growing trend amid a global renaissance for the nuclear industry.
Jean McSorley, nuclear campaigner at Greenpeace , said: “This shipment highlights the madness of trading in hazardous nuclear wastes. We are now forced to choose between keeping high-level radioactive waste here and making the UK a nuclear dumping ground, or pushing ahead with ten years of shipments which pose an environmental risk and could be terrorist targets.”
But Rupert Wilcox-Baker, the corporate responsibility director for International Nuclear Services, the company overseeing the shipments, rejected these concerns. “These ships are built to very high international standards,” he said. “We have been operating nuclear shipments for 40 years and have never had an incident involving the release of radioactivity.”
Under contracts made with Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, spent nuclear fuel rods from foreign power stations were transported to Britain for reprocessing, a complex chemical process designed to strip out uranium and plutonium for re-use while concentrating the remaining high-level waste for long-term storage deep underground.
It is this material, comprising isotopes that will remain highly radioactive for up to 100,000 years, that is being returned to foreign power companies. It was due to be returned a decade ago but problems with the Sellafield plant and commercial disagreements led to lengthy delays.
About 5,000 steel canisters of this material, direct exposure to which would kill a human being instantly, are held at Sellafield. Most are the product of Britain’s domestic civil nuclear power programme. The repatriation effort will cut Britain’s stockpile of high-level nuclear waste by about 37 per cent.
Japan, historically Britain’s biggest customer for nuclear waste services, plans to store the canisters temporarily at the Rokkasho nuclear facility. Like Britain, it has not yet built a repository for permanent storage.