UK abandons nuclear fuel reprocessing
New Scientist Breaking News - UK abandons nuclear fuel reprocessing
17:22 26 August 2003
NewScientist.com news service
Rob Edwards
Fuel reprocessing, a technology that helped launch the world's nuclear industry half a century ago, is to be abandoned by Britain. However, the UK industry's hope of using the plutonium it produced remains.
The state-owned company, British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), has not denied reports that the reprocessing plant at Sellafield in Cumbria, known as THORP, is due to close in 2010. With the closure of a second, smaller, plant at the site in 2012, this will spell the end of the technology that has historically been Sellafield's main reason for existence.
But Sellafield's director, Brian Watson, also told the UK's Guardian newspaper that he would like to build a new reactor capable of burning the 90 tonnes of plutonium already stockpiled from reprocessing. BNFL has recently completed a plant to mix plutonium and uranium oxide into MOX fuel at Sellafield.
But the plan has been immediately condemned by anti-nuclear campaigners. "Nothing is ever as it seems with the nuclear industry," says Shaun Burnie, from Greenpeace International. He told New Scientist that a new plutonium reactor "would be just as much of a threat" as a reprocessing plant, because it would mean the fuel still remained in a useable state.
Elsewhere in the world, there are still major nuclear reprocessing programmes in France, Japan, Russia and India. Even the US, which stopped reprocessing in the 1970s, now has tentative plans to build a new plant, while North Korea is suspected of using one to extract plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Fast breeder reactors
After uranium fuel has been burnt in a reactor it can be dissolved in acid and chemically separated in a reprocessing plant. This produces both plutonium and uranium that can be recycled as fuel, and a variety of radioactive wastes requiring disposal.
The first reprocessing plants were built in the 1950s to extract plutonium for nuclear warheads. Then the industry thought that the metal would be burnt in a new generation of fast breeder reactors, meaning more energy could be produced from each batch of uranium. But the fast breeder reactors turned out to be expensive to build and difficult to operate.
THORP started up at Sellafield in 1994, with BNFL originally hoping it would operate until past 2020. But the plant has been dogged with technical problems, such as solidifying the highly radioactive liquid waste it produces, and never won as many foreign contracts as BNFL hoped.
Now BNFL say that the THORP plant only has enough work to keep it going until 2010. "The focus of the Sellafield site is shifting from commercial reprocessing to clean up and managing the historic legacy," said a company spokeswoman.
Malcolm Grimston, a nuclear analyst from Imperial College in London, points out that when THORP was first conceived in the 1970s, the industry was expecting a massive expansion of nuclear power. "Things looked very different then," he says.
17:22 26 August 2003
NewScientist.com news service
Rob Edwards
Fuel reprocessing, a technology that helped launch the world's nuclear industry half a century ago, is to be abandoned by Britain. However, the UK industry's hope of using the plutonium it produced remains.
The state-owned company, British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), has not denied reports that the reprocessing plant at Sellafield in Cumbria, known as THORP, is due to close in 2010. With the closure of a second, smaller, plant at the site in 2012, this will spell the end of the technology that has historically been Sellafield's main reason for existence.
But Sellafield's director, Brian Watson, also told the UK's Guardian newspaper that he would like to build a new reactor capable of burning the 90 tonnes of plutonium already stockpiled from reprocessing. BNFL has recently completed a plant to mix plutonium and uranium oxide into MOX fuel at Sellafield.
But the plan has been immediately condemned by anti-nuclear campaigners. "Nothing is ever as it seems with the nuclear industry," says Shaun Burnie, from Greenpeace International. He told New Scientist that a new plutonium reactor "would be just as much of a threat" as a reprocessing plant, because it would mean the fuel still remained in a useable state.
Elsewhere in the world, there are still major nuclear reprocessing programmes in France, Japan, Russia and India. Even the US, which stopped reprocessing in the 1970s, now has tentative plans to build a new plant, while North Korea is suspected of using one to extract plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Fast breeder reactors
After uranium fuel has been burnt in a reactor it can be dissolved in acid and chemically separated in a reprocessing plant. This produces both plutonium and uranium that can be recycled as fuel, and a variety of radioactive wastes requiring disposal.
The first reprocessing plants were built in the 1950s to extract plutonium for nuclear warheads. Then the industry thought that the metal would be burnt in a new generation of fast breeder reactors, meaning more energy could be produced from each batch of uranium. But the fast breeder reactors turned out to be expensive to build and difficult to operate.
THORP started up at Sellafield in 1994, with BNFL originally hoping it would operate until past 2020. But the plant has been dogged with technical problems, such as solidifying the highly radioactive liquid waste it produces, and never won as many foreign contracts as BNFL hoped.
Now BNFL say that the THORP plant only has enough work to keep it going until 2010. "The focus of the Sellafield site is shifting from commercial reprocessing to clean up and managing the historic legacy," said a company spokeswoman.
Malcolm Grimston, a nuclear analyst from Imperial College in London, points out that when THORP was first conceived in the 1970s, the industry was expecting a massive expansion of nuclear power. "Things looked very different then," he says.
posted by Marcel at 7:36 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home