Huge Radioactive Leak closes British Nuclear plant

Dangers posed by the Sellafield nuclear plant could threaten Britian and Ireland for the next 150 years.
With the site winding down operations it is likely that discharge levels of radioactive waste would increase during decommissioning.
Sellafield, originally known as Windscale, was built in the late 1940s and first generated electricity 1956. It ran into problems almost immediately after a fire broke out in a chimney spreading radioactivity across the local countryside.
At the time, it was the world’s worst nuclear accident and is still regarded as Britain’s most severe.
The main activities at the site now involve the storage and reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, the storage of plutonium and uranium, the fabrication of mixed oxide fuel and decommissioning activities.
The site, originally run by a private for-profit company, called British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL), has been handed back to the British Government, now that expensive decommisioning is required.

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 Sellafield’s Thorp reprocessing plant.

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 which is so radioactive that it is impossible to enter.

Recovering the liquids and fixing the pipes will take months and may require special robots to be built and sophisticated engineering techniques devised to repair the £2.1bn plant.

The leak is not a danger to the public but is likely to be a financial disaster for the taxpayer since income from the Thorp plant, calculated to be more than £1m a day, is supposed to pay for the cleanup 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% of 1990 levels by 2010, despite a substantial programme of wind farm construction, while generating capacity will also be hit by the rundown of some of Britain’s coal-fired power stations.

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