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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 172 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 172, February 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
A new, deadly chapter in nuclear madness has opened with parliament’s permission for Thorp to start operations at Sellafield. This giant reprocessing plant – half a mile long, containing over 220,000 cubic metres of concrete, 60,000 tonnes of steel and over 1,200 miles of cables, with a chimney taller than St Paul’s Cathedral – has cost a staggering £2.85 billion to build.
The justification its owners, British Nuclear Fuels Ltd, give is that it is too dangerous to store the spent fuel from Britain’s nuclear power stations. It must be reprocessed to make fresh fuel, mostly plutonium. This will be expensive, BNFL admits, but Thorp can also make money from taking in the world’s nuclear waste – as much as £500 million in the first ten years of operations. Not to go ahead, they told the government, would cost anything up to £3 million a week.
Independent authorities contest BNFL’s figures right down the line. The Science Policy Research Unit at Sussex University argues that no profit may ever be made at Thorp because BNFL’s assumptions are wrong. The costs of reprocessing fuel are much greater than what it will cost to store this waste.
Finances are not the only concern. Plutonium is at the heart of nuclear weaponry. It has no other use, though during the Cold War governments dreamed it could have a peaceful application. The military economy spawned successive generations of nuclear power stations, the most advanced of which were the fast breeder reactors. These would, it was thought, refuel themselves with plutonium to create eternal, cheap electricity.
In the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis reprocessing seemed the magic solution. In 1975 Tony Benn, then energy minister in the Labour government, agreed to BNFL’s plans for Thorp.
Twenty years on and the world is utterly different. Raw uranium is cheap and plentiful and there are only half the nuclear power stations that people thought there would be in the 1970s. After the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl disasters most countries have stopped building nuclear reactors. Britain’s one fast breeder reactor has proved a disaster. Last year it produced enough electricity to light up the city of Aberdeen.
The world is now awash with surplus plutonium from dismantled nuclear bomb stocks and civilian reactors. With all this spare plutonium around the danger is of unchecked proliferation as more and more states struggle to develop nuclear weapons programmes.
Countries might steal or buy on the black market the few kilograms needed to create a crude nuclear explosive (and Thorp is so big that as much as 250 kilograms of the stuff could go missing without anyone noticing – enough to make 30 nuclear weapons).
North Korea’s nuclear development is due largely to its fear of what may come of Japan’s plans to develop its plutonium fast breeder programme. This growing instability in the Pacific Rim (South Korea also wants to get in on the nuclear act) is directly related to reprocessing. Japan is Thorp’s biggest customer and top investor.
Japan is committed at present to Thorp but is nervous about the hostile reception to ships carrying its nuclear waste. Last year country after country closed their ports to one test plutonium ship. The alternative is for Japan eventually to do its own reprocessing. But the prospect of stockpiling, with the suspicion that this could be used not just for ‘peaceful’ purposes, is not one that Japan relishes.
Thorp is a colossal waste of nearly £3 billion. We shall continue to pay for years to come – in government subsidies, increases in nuclear related illnesses like leukaemia and the growing risk of nuclear accident or terrorism. The dangerous idiocy of it all should have attracted enormous opposition. The issue is as threatening as any of the issues which made CND a mass movement over a decade ago. Within ten years there will be more plutonium at Sellafield than the whole of the US military has at present.
The reason for the lack of campaign has to do with the disgraceful role played by the unions and the Labour Party. The unions have supported Thorp on the grounds that it preserves jobs in an area which would be devastated without Sellafield. And Labour has refused to oppose the government, taking refuge in the call for a public inquiry. Dr Jack Cunningham, whose constituency includes Sellafield, is an ardent fan of Thorp.
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