Plutonium mix nuclear plant a British financial disaster
Though the annual loss is kept secret, the cable – passed to this newspaper by WikiLeaks – states that it is “costing taxpayers £90 million a year” It remains, it adds, “a black mark for the entire industry”.
So the nuclear plant does not work, loses £90 million a 
year, and could be a security risk? Let’s build another, say ministers A bomb factory in our back yard, – Telegraph, UK, 14 Feb 2011, The so-called Mox plant could well go rogue, Geoffrey Lean. How’s this for timing? A week ago The Daily Telegraph published a confidential cable from the US embassy calling a controversial plant at Sellafield “one of Her Majesty’s Government’s most embarrassing failures in British industrial history”. Then, within days, ministers said they were minded to build another one like it.
The embassy was not wrong. The so-called Mox plant, which makes nuclear fuel out of uranium and plutonium at the Cumbrian nuclear complex, is not just – as the cable put it – a “white elephant”, but one that could well go rogue. Built at a cost of £473 million, despite repeated warnings that it would be uneconomic and could be a security risk, it has never worked properly. Supposed to churn out a grand total of 560 tons of fuel by the end of its first decade of operation, later this year, it has so far produced just 15.
Even though the Government wrote off its capital cost, it is still haemorrhaging money. Though the annual loss is kept secret, the cable – passed to this newspaper by WikiLeaks – states that it is “costing taxpayers £90 million a year” It remains, it adds, “a black mark for the entire industry”.
Yet, unbelievably, ministers seem keen to repeat the exercise. The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) published a little-noticed consultation document this week that made it clear that its “preferred option” was to build another Mox plant as “a proven technology” that offers “the best prospect” of finding a solution for our vast stockpiles of plutonium. But even if it works this time, it will greatly increase the chances of terrorists getting nuclear weapons.
The problem is that Britain has the dubious distinction of being the world’s civilian plutonium capital, with 112 tons of it – about half the global total – almost all stored at Sellafield. It is there because, unlike in America, we “reprocess” our nuclear waste to extract plutonium. The idea was for it to power a new generation of “fast breeder” reactors, but the industry admits these are still half a century away, and so we are stuck with the stuff.
The ill-fated Mox plant was designed to turn the plutonium into fuel for present-day power stations, and ministers are still stuck on the idea. In supporting documents, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which runs Sellafield, insists that there have been “improvements” in the existing plant’s “performance” since 2008. And so there have, but they are barely noticeable: by then it had produced just 5.3 tons of fuel. It has since managed another 9.7…..A bomb factory in our back yard – Telegraph
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