After decades of poorly regulated nuclear weapons development and manufacturing and decades more of cleanup efforts, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in central Washington State is still one of the most radioactively polluted areas on the entire planet. Shortage of money, poor oversight and incompetence are still hampering cleanup efforts. In Russia, there is a similar legacy from the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons development around Murmansk which polluted the region's land, rivers and water table with nuclear waste. The U.S. and the Soviet Union are the two biggest builders of nuclear weapons on Earth. However, they are not the only countries with nuclear pollution left over from nuclear weapons work.
In the U.K., the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing site was built on the Cumbria coast of northwest England in the late 1940s to produce plutonium for creating the U.K. atomic bomb. The Sellafield site is also the location of the first commercial nuclear power plant in the world. Sellafield became the storage site for spent nuclear fuel from nuclear power reactors in the U.K.
Sellafield holds four of the most dangerous stores of radioactive wastes in the world. They in the 1950s. There are four ponds and silos of nuclear waste dating back to the beginning of the nuclear age that have been designated as high priority for cleanup. These silos and ponds contain hundreds of tons of highly radioactive materials left over from more than sixty years of operation. The exact contents of the ponds and silos is unknown. The silos are cracking and leaking. The ponds are leaking into the soil. There is a risk of explosions from gases that are generated by corrosion. An accident at Sellafield could have devastating consequences for the U.K.
A private consortium was created in 2008 called the Nuclear Management Partners. They were supposed to bring "world-class expertise" to the job. Now, six years later, two of the four high priority projects are behind schedule. The three hundred foot Pile pond holds spent nuclear and other waste left over from work on nuclear weapons in the 1950s and 1960s. It was supposed to be completely drained by 2025 but a new schedule published last December now says that the pond will be cleaned up by 2030. The accompanying Pile fuel cladding silo which was filled up in 1964 was supposed to be done by 2025. The new schedule called for 2029.
Last week, the U.K. government announced that it was abandoning the privatization experiment after six years of disappointing progress. The one hundred and twenty billion dollar contract with Nuclear Management Partners has been cancelled. The cleanup project will be handled by the U.K. Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. The cleanup is now scheduled to be finished by 2120 at a cost of almost three billion dollars a year.
While I applaud the U.K. government in cancelling the consortium's contract, I am somewhat astonished that the U.K. government thinks that they can plan for a hundred year cleanup program. There are so many looming global economic, political, social and environmental problems that the U.K. would be lucky to be able to make solid plans for the next twenty years. A one hundred years program is just a fantasy.
Sellafield Pile Cladding Silo:
