Imagine, while you were getting ready for work this morning, you saw your company’s director of health and safety on the TV. Turning up the volume, you hear him advising the company’s workers ‘not to have children’. What would your reaction be?

That’s exactly what happened at the Sellafield nuclear facility in the north-west of England 20 years ago. After a study that suggested a link between the exposure of Sellafield’s staff to radiation and the instances of cancer in their children, Roger Berry, the director of health and safety at the company, also suggested establishing a sperm bank and recruiting ‘"radiation volunteers" from among older workers in order to reduce levels of exposure for workers of child-bearing age.’

The story is revealed in the autobiography of Harold Bolter, a former director of British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), the company that used to run Sellafield. He calls Berry’s announcement a ‘public relations disaster’ and speaks of his anxiety to ‘protect the company’. The ‘disaster’ of what this did to Sellafield’s workers and what was done to ‘protect’ them and their children, beyond the offer of ‘medical counselling’, isn’t recorded.

Bolter’s book’s foreword is written by Bernard Ingham. After being UK Prime Minster Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary, Ingham became an adviser to BNFL. He spent 25 years, as he himself described, ‘trying to preserve nuclear power’ and once wrote ‘nuclear power is greener than windfarms’.

That should give us an idea of how balanced Bolter’s approach to what went on at Sellafield might be. We’ve yet to see any wind turbine companies giving their employees family planning advice.

Posted by Justin at 5:03 PM | Permalink

Over in India, and in a fit of wild optimism, the Russian Ambassador to India Alexander Kadakin has declared his country plans to build ‘up 12 to 14 nuclear reactors in India’. He must have missed the news that ‘eleven of India's 17 nuclear power reactors are operating below optimum capacity due to a lack of sufficient supplies of indigenous uranium’. The fuel for those 12 to 14 new reactors is going to have to come from somewhere, Ambassador Kadakin. Still, there should be plenty to go around when the nuclear ‘renaissance’ finally takes off, yes?

Or maybe not. China ‘operates 11 reactors and has 17 under construction, but has 124 more on the drawing boards’. Unfortunately, this is ‘raising questions about its ability to find the uranium it will need, at home or abroad’. Sound familiar? Maybe they could ask Alexander Kadakin for some advice and reassurance. Goodbye Oil Crisis, Hello Uranium Crisis.

In the UK, the consortium looking to build new nuclear reactors at Sellafield in the North West of England have said that ‘a final decision on whether to build a 3,200 megawatt nuclear plant in the U.K. won't be taken before 2015’. 2015? If this is the nuclear industry moving with haste to help in the battle against catastrophic climate change we’d hate to see it moving slowly.

Never fear, however. In (another) fit of wild optimism, Ignacio Galan, Chairman of Spanish energy group and consortium partner Iberdrola SA said ‘the new nuclear plant in the U.K. won't be operational until 2018 to 2020’. That’s a decision made in 2015 and then two state-of-the-art nuclear reactors built and operational (if the designs get approval) three-to-five years later? That’s some weapons grade confidence Senor Galan has going on there. If only we could harness it to generate electricity we could close down the nuclear industry overnight.

Posted by Justin at 9:48 AM | Permalink

So, in July 2007, there were these two contractors working at the Sellafield nuclear plant in North West England. They were drilling through a concrete floor in a nuclear waste storage facility that was being converted into offices.

They were wearing protective masks and suits, and had equipment to monitor radiation levels.

When two radioactive ‘hot spots’ were detected, the men decided to keep working.

One of the men removed his mask.

One of the pair received a dose of radiation of 17 milli-sieverts. The statutory annual dosage limit is 20.

Mark Bassett, the UK Health and Safety Executive's (HSE) superintending nuclear inspector, said: ‘Although the radiation doses in this case were below the statutory dose limits, they could potentially have been higher. They should have been zero.’

The operating company Sellafield – which is jointly owned by Amec, AREVA and URS Washington – was fined £75,000 in the ensuing court case which delivered its verdict last week. The consortium was also ordered to pay £26,000 in court costs.

Amec, Areva and URS Washington operate Sellafield under the consortium name Nuclear Management Partners Ltd. Last year it was awarded the contract to operate Sellafield for up to 17 years. The contract is worth £22 billion.

So, that’s a £101,000 penalty over a £22,000,000,000 contract. We’re sure Nuclear Management Partners Ltd felt suitably chastised as they handed over 0.00046% of their money. Mark Bassett of the HSE described the punishment as ‘relatively high’. That’s quite some exaggeration. He must think ants are ‘relatively enormous’.

Posted by Justin at 1:04 PM | Permalink

Calder Hall, the world’s first industrial scale nuclear reactor to produce electricity on a commercial basis, began operating at what is now Sellafield in the UK on August 20 1956. Of course, producing electricity at Calder Hall was secondary to producing plutonium for the country’s nuclear weapons programme. Nuclear power and weapons have walked hand in hand ever since.

As Stephanie Cooke in her nuclear history, In Mortal Hands, says, Calder Hall was…

…designed and built to produce plutonium for weapons; electricity was only an added extra. ‘We needed the nuclear deterrent and in order to get it you needed the by-product of peaceful nuclear energy,’ said Eric Price… a government energy economist.

[…]

As Price soon realise, the government’s nuclear game plan required economic inventiveness and the perpetration of another myth, that nuclear electricity would prove both less expensive and more reliable than alternative energy sources.

[…]

‘The decisions were not economic. In fact they were far from economic. In fact I would say they were gravely distorted,’ Price said.

In 1956 that alternative energy source was coal. Five decades later the sources have changed to wind, solar and the rest. The economic inventiveness, the perpetration of nuclear myth, and the grave distortions, however, remain the same. From these small beginning in the UK (and the US and Russia), the dirty technology and the equally dirty tactics spread out over the globe.

The decommissioning of Calder Hall is ongoing, dangerous and slow. As Ewan Hutton, a decommissioner at Sellafield says in this video, the reactors were ‘built in a great hurry and they didn’t really think about how we were going to take them apart’.
When it was closed for decommissioning after 47 years in 2003 (its cooling towers were demolished in 2007), Calder Hall was the world’s oldest nuclear reactor.

The same year the UK government published a policy paper describing ‘nuclear power as "economically unattractive", and focussed on the potential for renewable energy.’ And yet, from that forward-looking thinking, the UK government, like others, with their new calls for a nuclear ‘renaissance’ have slipped back. Back to 1956.

Posted by Justin at 3:45 PM | Permalink

Nuclear power is safe say its supporters. Safe, safe, safe.

Tell that to the family of Duncan Ball…

Duncan Ball, who worked in the [Sellafield] Magnox plant for 20 years, died on July 17. He was 49.

In 2007 Mr Ball was diagnosed with a bone marrow cancer (multiple myeloma) and The Whitehaven News understands he received an interim payment from the nuclear industry scheme to compensate workers or their dependents for diseases which may be radiation-linked.

Posted by Justin at 4:59 PM | Permalink

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

Whitehaven News: 'Rogue' radioactive material to be sent to France
’This is the batch of eight Mox fuel assemblies made at Sellafield and later found to be "falsified" in its specification data after being shipped out to customers in Japan. The faked pellets scandal led to loss of business confidence in BNFL and for a time Japan refused to strike any further deals with Sellafield. The fuel, a mixture of plutonium and uranium, was sent back to Sellafield - seven years ago. Now, after several years "evaluating the best options", agreement has been reached with the government that the "rogue" fuel batch, along with a another eight, will be shipped to France for treatment - but not until 2014/15.’

Continue reading "Nuclear News: 'Rogue' Sellafield radioactive material to be sent to France" »

Posted by Justin at 5:01 PM | Permalink

Today's big stories from the nuclear industry:

Nuclear N-Former: Indian reactor shuts down for the third time in three weeks
’The Indian Point nuclear power plant is struggling to keep its reactors running. Plant operators shut down reactor Unit 3 again Sunday night to address more problems on its main boiler feedwater pumps. This is the third time the reactor has been forced offline in three weeks. Officials with Entergy Nuclear, the company that owns and operates Indian Point, said the hitches pose no threat to its workers or the public. "The plant is designed to shut down at the slightest hint that something may not be working optimally," said spokesman Jerry Nappi.’

Continue reading "Nuclear News: Indian reactor shuts down for the third time in three weeks" »

Posted by Justin at 7:03 PM | Permalink