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Nuclear leak at Sellafield
Rebecca Camber9/ 5/2005
A NUCLEAR reprocessing plant at Sellafield has closed after a radioactive leak.
The Thorp reprocessing plant - one of two plants on the Cumbrian site - was forced to shut after a split pipe leaked enough contaminated liquid to fill a large swimming pool.
The spill of a highly dangerous mix of nuclear fuel dissolved in concentrated nitric acid into a huge stainless steel chamber is not a danger to the public.
But it may take months to clean up because the chamber is now so radioactive that it is impossible to enter.
Experts may have to build special robots to recover the 20 tonnes of liquid contaminated with uranium and plutonium and fix the pipe at the '2.1bn plant.
The leak is likely to be a financial disaster for the taxpayer as income from the Thorp plant - calculated to be more than '1m a day - is supposed to pay for the clean-up of redundant nuclear facilities.
The problem was first spotted on April 19 when operators could not account for all the spent fuel that had been dissolved in nitric acid.
The liquid was supposed to travel through the plant, be measured, and then separated into uranium, plutonium and waste products.
Remote cameras scanning the interior of the plant found the leak.
Pipe
The plant shut the same day. On Friday the British Nuclear Group - a management company formed to run the Sellafield site on behalf of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority - 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 fuel will have to be siphoned off and stored until the pipe is repaired to conform to international safeguards preventing nuclear materials falling into the wrong hands. But engineers have yet to come up with a way of doing this.
The company has set up a board of inquiry to find out how the leak occurred. The NII will set up a separate investigation and has the power to prosecute if correct procedures have not been followed.
The closure comes at a crucial 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 programme of wind farm construction.
The decision on whether to build a new generation of nuclear power stations is among the most sensitive Tony Blair faces after the election.
The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority which took over ownership of the plant from British Nuclear Fuels in April - has a '2.2bn clean-up budget for this year, of which '560m was to come from the Thorp plant.
The managing director of British Nuclear Group Sellafield, Barry Snelson, who ordered the plant to be closed down, said: "Let me reassure people that the plant is in a safe and stable state."
Should we get rid of nuclear power stations? Have your say.
Most recent 2 of 26 user comments
20/09/2005 at 20:25
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Was BBC right to let Wossy back to work?
This incident had nothing what so ever to do with the Irish sea or any other body of water for that matter.
I would suggest that you do not jump to conclusions based on what limited information is published in papers accessable to the general public.
Considering that technological advancement is near enough doubling in speed every decade, I firmly believe that safer ways to sustain nuclear plants will shortly become available but at the moment there is no justified reason for closing down productive nuclear plants.
13/12/2005 at 04:32
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