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Dinosaur At Large

New Ground 62
Winter 2001

Allowing Sellafield to operate its MOX plant and send plutonium abroad despite the risk of terrorist attack is madness, says David Lowry

So said the prime minister. He was right. Sadly the speaker was Ireland’s prime minister, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, not Tony Blair. Ahern was reacting to Blair’s decision to allow BNFL to operate its mixed oxide (MOX) plutonium fuels plant (SMP) at Sellafield, announced by Defra minister Margaret Beckett on Oct 3. That was the day after Blair made his conference speech pledging to combat global terrorism.

Irish politicians allege Blair hoped to bury the decision that the UK will export fuel made from plutonium, the prime nuclear explosive, across the high seas to Japan, by authorising its announcement in the wake of the wider terrorist news of Sept 11.

If so, Labour spin doctors were disappointed. Irish newspapers put fears of terror attacks on Sellafield on their front pages, Ireland applied for an injunction in international courts to halt the exports, while Greenpeace UK and Friends of the Earth challenged their legality in the British High Court. These initial legal moves failed, but lawyers are now working on the next round. As someone who has worked for Labour politicians since 1982, I never thought I would find myself supporting a legal challenge against a Labour cabinet decision. However this decision, in favour of giving terrorists attractive targets at sea as well as at Sellafield, is so irresponsible that all Labour supporters and voters should oppose it.

The government’s justification of SMP is extraordinary in its complacency. The government says:

"The operation of the SMP does not materially affect the availability of potential targets for hi-jacked aircraft. The SMP is one of many plants within a large industrial site and has no special features which would single it out from others on the Sellafield site."

So we’re safe then – as long as no terrorist ever works out which building at Sellafield holds the plutonium plant. The government also says:

"The Office for Civil Nuclear Security has advised that the manufacture of MOX fuel and its transportation present negligible nuclear security or proliferation risks."

Compare this complacency with the concern of Professor Frank Barnaby, former atomic bomb designer at Aldermaston, and former director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, who said it would not be hard for terrorists to make crude nuclear devices from stolen MOX by separating out its plutonium. Barnaby said:

"The size of the nuclear explosion from such a crude device is impossible to predict. But even if it were only equivalent to the explosion of a few tens of tons of TNT it would completely devastate the centre of a large city."

Margaret Beckett is on record as saying ministers considered all relevant information regarding MOX fuel. This should have included a letter from Paul Leventhal, president of the Nuclear Control Institute, submitted to Blair and copied to Beckett a week after the terrorist atrocities in the US. Leventhal wrote there is no reason to believe that Sellafield would withstand a suicide plane attack better than the World Trade Centre or the Pentagon. He added:

"Amounts of plutonium sufficient to induce thousands of latent cancers could be widely dispersed if SMP were to be attacked. Moreover, the MOX fuel that SMP would fabricate for distribution internationally poses a grave proliferation risk."

With the letter was an index of research on nuclear risks, including a warning that attacks on nuclear energy facilities that caused radiation leaks could do as much damage as a crude nuclear bomb. One researcher warned that regulatory agencies seem to be concentrating on problems with easy solutions, rather than hard-to-control risks such as suicide bombers or sabotage by insiders.

Leventhal also pointed out about 300 tonnes of separated plutonium have been produced in civilian nuclear power programmes, of which about a third has been used as fuel in reactors, leaving the rest in civilian hands. The UK should concentrate on reducing the amount of plutonium and MOX fuel in circulation, he said, by converting SMP to an immobilization plant that would prepare plutonium for direct disposal as waste. (This option is now being studied by BNFL.)

Shortly after the terrorist attacks, the pro-nuclear International Atomic Energy Agency began its annual conference in Vienna, at which it unveiled an extraordinary paper on nuclear security in which it admitted there are now 380 cases of recorded "illicit trafficking" in nuclear materials, including 63 in the past year. Seventy-five per cent of these are said to involve illegal activities. If MOX proves a disaster, the government can’t say it wasn’t warned.