| Some Salient points from a 2003 Report by
the Bellona Organisation. (Originally a Norwegian environmental group, now with global interests.) www.bellona.org |
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This report is probably the best so far at explaining the historical aspects of the Sellafield and Windscale sites, gradually working up to (almost) the present. It includes lots of explanatory graphs and tables, too. Non-antagonistic, referenced and factual. Well worth the read, albeit 80 pages long. We have taken the liberty of copying some of the (in our opinion) most interesting bits, but would recommend a quiet study of the whole document, which can be found at: http://www.bellona.org/filearchive/fil_sellaengweb.pdf On occasion we have
felt obliged to add comments; these are highlighted in red, and
do not form any part of the original.
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| Measurements
of radioactive waste in the Barents Sea indicate that the historical
releases of radioactivity from Sellafield, along with fallout from
nuclear test explosions at Novaya Zemlya are the primary
culprits.
Today it is the large releases of the radioactive element technetium-99
(Tc-99) from Sellafield that is largely responsible for the pollution
of the Norwegian coast and the Barents Sea.
The largest concentrations of radioactivity may be found along the coastline off the Sellafield site itself. In this area, higher concentrations of plutonium have been detected than those that can be measured in the area around Chernobyl. Radioactive contamination has been traced in shellfish, fish, and seaweed, to ocean water, sediments on the bottom of the Irish Sea and in sand on the beaches. In the years to come, BNFL plans to increase activity at its two reprocessing plants at Sellafield, and this will naturally lead to further increases in radioactive discharges. In 1972, B205 was shut down for one year for repairs, and as a consequence B204 also had to be closed. The pre-handling plant was supposed to reopen on September 26, 1973. However, when the operators started up the plant, a chemical reaction occurred which released a cloud of radioactive gas.The entire plant was contaminated by radiation, and 34 workers were exposed to radioactive ruthenium-106. After that, B204 was never taken into use again. It cost £2.8 billion to build THORP (£ at 1993 value). This exceeded the original construction budget by a factor of three. It was however assumed that this amount would be recouped by income earned from the reprocessing of foreign fuel. BNFL expected the plant to realise profits of £50 million annually, or £500 million during the first ten years. Yet even a profit of £500 million would only cover 18% of the actual construction costs for THORP. Almost 90% of the contracts were signed more than ten years before the facility was completed, and a third of the foreign contracts were signed prior to 1976. [All the material subject to these contracts should have been reprocessed by 2004.] German companies have discovered that it would be cheaper for them to take responsibility for their spent nuclear fuel themselves than to send it to Sellafield. The director of British Energy stated on an earlier occasion that his company considers reprocessing to be "economic nonsense". In 1992, BNFL estimated that it would cost £900 million to decommission THORP. According to plan, THORP was to be decommissioned 50 years after the shutting down of the facility.This estimate is made from the starting point that the facility was to operated for 25 years and shut down before 2020. The Germans shut down their pilot project in reprocessing at Karlsruhe (WAK) in 1991 and have estimated the costs of decommissioning to £600 million. WAK was much smaller than THORP with a capacity that was less than 5% that of the British facility. A number of experts are concerned that new MOX fuel can easily be utilised by terrorists to construct so-called "dirty bombs", and have consequently advised against granting the new MOX factory a licence.This conclusion was also reached in a report by Oxford Research Group, which was commissioned by the British Ministry of the Environment. An independent report commissioned by the British government shows that at best, SMP will earn only £216 million of the £460 million it cost to build the plant. In court hearings at The Hague, in July, 2003, the court criticised Great Britain for its lack of co-operation with Ireland concerning nuclear safety. In 1996, the Swedish government went to great lengths to have the Swedish nuclear fuel returned to Sweden without having it reprocessed. According to an exchange of letters between the British Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and the Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate (SKI) there were no technical or regulatory obstacles in the way to prevent the return of the fuel. However, negotiations to return the Swedish fuel stranded in 1997 when BNFL reprocessed the Swedish fuel, 140 tonnes in all. There is speculation as to whether BNFL did this to ensure itself future MOX contracts. [Trust Me, I'm a Doctor - and you are just part of a big experiment.] Dr. John Dunster, was a physicist at the UKAEA, and at the time [in the early 1950s] he was in charge of Sellafield. In 1958, at the second UN conference concerning peaceful uses of nuclear energy, Dunster told UN delegates about the experiment: "The intention has been to discharge fairly substantial amounts of radioactivity … the aims of this experiment would have been defeated if the level of radioactivity discharged had been kept to a minimum." He continued, explaining that the discharges had been: "… high enough to obtain detectable levels in samples of fish, seaweed and shore sand, and the experiment is still proceeding. In 1956 the rate of discharge of radioactivity was deliberately increased, partly to dispose of unwanted waste, but principally to yield better experimental data." In more recent years, it has become clear that the experiment started in May 1952 and continued well into the decade. In the mid of the 1980s, Dunster became director of the National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB), which is the national authority that advises on maximum permissible radiation doses to the British population. Workers at the Sellafield facility itself were exposed to radiation doses 150 times higher than the prescribed dose limit, while certain individuals among the local inhabitants were exposed to radiation doses 10 times higher than the maximum lifetime doses. Though UKAEA knew about the high radiation levels, it was nevertheless decided not to evacuate the population. Milk samples taken from a farm in Grasmere in the Lake District showed concentrations of between 4 400 Bq per litre and 6 600 Bq per litre.Yet despite these discoveries, the milk was nevertheless distributed to the market.The papers documenting these figures were classified by the government so as to avoid "unnecessarily alarming" the population. The British Prime Minister at the time, Harold MacMillan, suppressed all technical information concerning the accident. He feared that the conclusions of the accident report - that the accident occurred as a consequence of operator negligence and poor instrumentation, as well as the report's reference to an earlier accident in 1952 - would adversely affect the people's confidence in the nuclear energy programme, and postpone the development of British nuclear weapons. Macmillan declared that complete openness about the accident would jeopardise national security. It was 25 years before official estimates of the accident's effects on the health of local inhabitants were made public. In 1982, the British National Radiological Protection Board issued a report describing the full truth about the Windscale accident. It was estimated that 32 deaths and at least 260 cases of cancer could be attributed to the fire. However, independent experts maintain that the fire in actual fact led to over a thousand deaths. Full monitoring of radioactive discharges from the facility was not introduced until the Site Ion Exchange Plant (SIXEP) purification facility was installed in 1984. On an annual basis Sellafield was releasing over 50 TBq of plutonium, along with almost 6 000 TBq of beta emitters in addition.Yet one of BNFL's first acts after taking over the plant was apply for permission to increase the discharges even further. Originally the department desired to limit the discharges of caesium-137 to 370 TBq per quarter, but after intense lobbying from BNFL, the authorities consented to increase the upper limit to 555 TBq per quarter. The reason given was the tremendous corrosion problems BNFL were experiencing with spent Magnox fuel; furthermore it would be extremely expensive to reduce the high caesium discharges. Compared to the French reprocessing plant at La Hague, Sellafield in this period exceeded the French facility's releases of beta emitters by a factor of eight and the highly radiotoxic alpha emitters by as much as 200 times more. On November 18, 1983 an accident in BNFL's Magnox reprocessing facility led to uncontrolled discharges of large amounts of radioactivity to the sea. The discharge spread along the coast and contaminated the beaches in the area.The radioactivity in seaweed along the coastline was discovered to be so high that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) decided to cordon off over 20 kilometres of the shoreline.A major effort to clean up the beaches began, and restrictions on using the beaches remained in effect until the following summer. The authorities maintained that they had not been informed of the accident until a week after it had happened. Following a police investigation of the case, BNFL was fined £10,000 and also had to pay legal costs amounting to £60,000. [Still, it must be cheaper than having to deal with it properly!] In 1984 the British Waste Management Advisory Committee asserted that the population living in certain areas close to Sellafield, by mere means of their food intake alone would receive 69% of the critical dose limits as established by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP). Furthermore, researchers in the Department of Environmental Studies maintained that the population in the local vicinity of Sellafield area was also being exposed to radiation through fission products washed ashore. BNFL is planning a large increase in its tritium discharges in the coming years and has stated on several occasions that the existing discharge limits are too strict. If BFNL is to remain within the boundaries of its discharge permits, it would appear that it would have to reprocess less fuel than originally planned, thereby further irritating already exasperated customers. The alternative is to violate the established discharge limits. [Let's hope that any fine makes it commercially unsound to deliberately exceed the permitted levels. Why do we doubt that would be the case?] At Newbiggin, a few kilometres south of the Sellafield facility, tests show that the concentrations of alpha-emitting radioactive contamination along this beach have more than doubled since the beginning of the 1990s. Furthermore, figures from the Environment Agency show that this is not an isolated event, but that the concentrations of alphaemitting radionuclides are steadily increasing all along the Cumbrian coast. A closer examination of the individual samples from Newbiggin shows that the radionuclides having the highest values are primarily the highly radiotoxic isotopes plutonium-239/240 and americium-241. Plutonium-239/240 and americium-241 are three of the most injurious radionuclides in existence, and inhalation of even the minutest amounts of alpha-emitting plutonium can cause cancer.The numerical data show values for plutonium of more than 850 Bq/kg in the fourth quarter of 2000. This is also confirmed by BNFL, which in 2000 reported plutonium concentrations in sludge of 820 Bq/kg in the same area (Ravenglass, five kilometres south of Sellafield). Even though BNFL has reported lower discharges of plutonium and americium since the opening of the purification plant EARP in 1994, the concentrations of these radioactive substances in the marine environment remain more or less constant. At the end of the 1990s, the concentration of Am-241, Pu-239 and Pu-240 in mussels found outside Sellafield increased, as shown by studies carried out by FSA's forerunner, the Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food (MAFF). New figures from FSA confirm that the values for these elements do not appear to be sinking. A 1990 study, by a team from the University of Newcastle, showed that children under the age of seven who were born at Seascale between 1950 and 1991 had a 15 times greater probability than other children of developing lymph cancer or leukaemia. The study emphasised that employees at the facility were exposed to much higher radiation doses thirty years ago than is the rule today. BNFL on the other hand, puts greater weight on other causal relationships and supports a theory developed by Professor Leo Kinlen. [After all, it gets them off the hook!] Kinlen contends that the mixing of the population, which occurred when people started moving into the area to work at the facility, resulted in the spreading of a virus that could cause leukaemia. The theory as first developed in 1988 by Kinlen, but has achieved very little international recognition. Nor is there any evidence of the type of virus Kinlen refers to. [Even so, if this is the case, what will happen when a whole new influx of workers arrives to build and operate the new-builds?] The new discharge limits [of Tc-99, technetium] are still nine times higher than they were in 1993 when the ceiling was set at 10 TBq a year. It would therefore appear that the discharge permit was adjusted to fit the needs of BNFL as opposed to any concern about the substance's possible impact on the marine environment. BNFL is free to release as much Tc-99 as it wants to, so long as the discharges are spread out over a long period of time. [Nice to see the authorities taking such a hard line.] The dramatic increase in discharges is mainly due to two conditions. First of all, BNFL intends to reprocess all of the remaining Magnox fuel in its Magnox facilities before B205 is closed down in 2012. Secondly, THORP must reprocess large amounts of fuel in the coming years if BNFL is to fulfil the conditions of its contracts with its baseload customers. Much of this fuel has a higher burnup than the other types of fuel that are reprocessed at THORP, and BNFL says that this could cause problems in meeting all the discharge requirements. [Surely this has to be wrong? If the regulations stipulate levels then the regulators should be there to enforce them, not pander to the commercial needs of Sellafield?] The reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel generates new forms of radioactive waste. The volume of radioactive waste that comes of reprocessing is multiplied several times compared to direct storage of spent nuclear fuel on land. This is because all of the equipment utilised in reprocessing, such as solutions, acids, containers, filters and machine parts all become contaminated by radioactivity. [Not only that, but each refinement to remove contaminants produces waste which is even more difficult to remove.] The Nuclear Industry Radioactive Waste Management Executive (NIREX) is a company that was established at the behest of the British nuclear industry to assess strategies for coping with all the radioactive waste, including the highly active, vitrified waste. In 1991, NIREX identified an area in the vicinity of Sellafield as a possible place to deposit the waste. NIREX proposed to build a laboratory deep under ground to carry out further studies of the location. Today the plans have been put aside, and NIREX sharply criticised for its deportment during the political discussion of the matter. Accusations were made that the location was selected on grounds of political convenience and not necessarily because of suitability of the location's physical geology. It has since come out that NIREX withheld scientific information and attempted to portray Sellafield as a more suitable locale for a repository than their studies had actually shown. (Our emphasis.) [Anyone notice any similarity between NIREX and the NDA?] The environment surrounding Sellafield is already so contaminated that every new discharge of radioactivity violates the OSPAR convention, and the public health and environmental safety in the area. |