Safe jobs for Cumbria, Safe Energy for All

national | miscellaneous | news report Wednesday March 06, 2002 07:12 by Barry O'Donovan - SHUT DOWN SELLAFIELD fgodo at email dot com

This is written as a response to the pieces that have been posted recently by someone writing as "Sellafield employee".

This is written as a response to the pieces that have been posted recently by someone writing as "Sellafield employee". It is not my intention to go through the entire text with a tooth comb, I have read most of it too often before, whether "Sellafield employee" is the nuclear industries main polemicist writing globally for them, or just someone else who can cut, paste and paraphrase is something I do not know, but what I want to say might be fruitfully taken on board by any or all of them. This however I do know, if the author is working for BNFL, then he (I'm just guessing, but maybe I'm biased) is highly educated (it says so in all the literature), probably with a third level qualification. If your background is engineering or science based then you are aware that with something so complex as nuclear fission nothing can be guaranteed, and so I guess you are become blasé about the dangers faced each day. If your background is in PR or marketing (again possibly a biased guess, as they seem to the only people in BNFL who ever deign to speak publicly), then I would ask you to consider the reverse to one of the great truths of those professions, namely that although meaning can be twisted by taking a lone fact out of context, not every detail lacking in full justification and context is a lie. It is both difficult and depressing to have to present detailed statistical analysis as a pithy catchphrase.

I can't help pointing out a couple of things though; maybe it's too late at night. Anyway check out this bit of revealing thought progression:

"Sellafield is safe. There is NO threat to lives or the environment in Cumbria - the UK - Ireland - or anywhere due to the stringent safety checks carried out.
The 'forging' of safety checks was a 'minor' offence which BNFL has paid badly for - by losing several £100 million."

So that was 'threat to lives, safetychecks, forging of safetychecks, paid money'. Very reassuring. Or as the paragraph continues:

"Before the MOX pellets had even reached the operators several automated checks had been carried out. The Japanese even acknowledge that the pellets are SAFE."

- which is not quite true, is it? The Japanese are refusing to accept the pellets or any further fuel from BNFL because corners were being cut, and they've recently found out first-hand the effects this can have with nuclear facilities. Although they've recently also refused a French shipment of MOX fuel, which might lead one to wonder is it the process itself or the procedures used which are unsound. (I guess we may get to find out if they're allowed to build their own reprocessing plant, gee the possibility of having three contaminated, unemployed MOX fuel plants on one planet. Now that's a future for the Kids)

Anyway, here's another one, Brian Wilson (eventual top-level political fall-guy for BNFL, and UK energy minister) recently stated on RTE that one of BNFLs main tasks was the "management" of "cold war legacies":

"The WATER leaking to ground has been doing so for many years and is a WELL KNOWN fact. There are several safeguards in place to combat this WATER leaking to ground, such as collection points where the WATER is pumped to a holding tank. These collection points are monitored DAILY. The WATER leak is from old-plant which is a legacy from the cold-war era."

This water along with a good deal more goes through either the EARP or SIXEP facilities (each costing 100s of millions) where some of the radiotoxins (approx. 50% reduction in overall radioactivity between '95 (opening of cleanup plants) and '99 when levels began to increase again) are removed. In spite of their enormous costs these plants only remove most of some of the elements present in the discharge, those proven conclusively to cause health defects (a hard thing to prove), totally ignoring others e.g. Tc-99 which given previous experience may soon be proven harmful. This might be as easily be described as mis-management by a less sympathetic political master.

The nuclear industry is in its infancy still. In the name of plentiful, though hardly cheap or clean energy, in certain parts of the world a series of nuclear detonations are held at the brink of criticality. While this balancing act can be maintained it is referred to as being controlled. When this balance is lost the result is called an accident (in a warhead the intention is to reach criticality). Any safety measures that exist are reactive; they have been developed and put in place after an accident showed a need for them. Should not an "industry" whose major product after ephemeral and transient energy is radiotoxic and long lasting matter (in solid, liquid and gaseous forms, very prolific) have been developed firstly in a laboratory to the extent that proactive safety measures were possible. The primary reason for this not occurring is that we lack the energy capability to be able to contain nuclear reactions and so the ragged bleeding edge of technology has come to be seen as stable production. The cold war was the reason for this being allowed to occur, not the reason for its occurrence. In a less hysterical climate there were most likely have been no development of nuclear power, and it would be looked on for what it is, an impractical, inefficient and unsound method of generating steam.

Whilst harnessing wave power to drive turbines may not yet be practical, wind and solar are improving both from an economic and efficiency viewpoint on a constant basis. An example of this can be seen in the planned development of a wind farm off the Irish coast: €200 million anticipated cost for 500MW generating capability compared to the latest nuclear estimates of $1 billion for 1000MW with similar operating costs and obviously much lower maintenance and future decommissioning costs for the wind farm as it is environmentally neutral. BNFL themselves use solar panels for the lights on traffic signs outside Sellafield (now that all the reactors on the site have been shut down following a major core fault discovered in sister reactors in Chapel Cross, please tell me it's not true that Sellafield is now being powered by a coal station as one rumor has it. Please.)

A sustainable energy model for the future is going to require major advances in energy efficiency, an end to all forms of carbon based energy and the development of new energy sources. Our legacy of nuclear fission is going to require increasing investments of already scarce energy to retire plants, decontaminate facilities and store and monitor waste (as demonstrated to a degree in Dounreay where the entire cooling, ventilation and control systems must be rebuilt to allow decommissioning to begin). The nuclear industries' projections from the current model foresee a requirement for 300 new and 250 relicensed reactors by 2025. These new reactors would be built before the methods of decommissioning the existing stockpile are developed. This is not indicative of forward planning. The fact that the same model calls for a further 900 reactors to be built before 2050 seems to indicate some narrowness of vision on this industries part.

Sellafield is an important provider of jobs to the West Cumbrian region; the fact that those employed there are mainly proud of the work they do is a very fortunate thing given the nature of the work. It is not however the be-all and end-all of employment or fulfillment opportunities. BNFL recently won some RoSPA (health and safety) awards in the areas of construction and site decommissioning and decontamination. Please take some inspiration from this and build a cleaner, less hazardous future for yourselves, your families and your neighbors.

http://www.indymedia.ie/cgi-bin/newswire.cgi?id=751&start=0
http://www.indymedia.ie/cgi-bin/newswire.cgi?id=652&start=0&sid=56209
http://www.rte.ie/news/2002/0117/primetime.html
http://www.bellona.no/pdfs/wp5_2001_Sellafield_English.pdf