As the Public Accounts Committee has reported this week:
The retrieval of waste from ageing buildings at the most hazardous nuclear site in the UK is not happening quickly enough.
In its report on decommissioning Sellafield, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) warns that the estimated £136bn cost of the project would rise even more if work is further delayed, while expressing scepticism as to whether or not recent signs of improvement in performance could represent another false dawn.
The PAC found in 2018 that government needed a firmer grip on Sellafield's nuclear challenges, and now warns that not enough progress has been made in addressing its most significant hazards.
One building, the Magnox Swarf Storage Silo (MSSS), has been leaking radioactive water into the ground since 2018 – the PAC calculates, at current rates, enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool roughly every three years. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) accepts this leak is its "single biggest environmental issue", but that the radioactive particles are "contained" in the soil and do not pose a risk to the public.
The PAC's report finds that Sellafield Ltd has missed most of its annual targets for retrieving waste from several buildings on the site, including the MSSS. The PAC's inquiry heard that the MSSS is the most hazardous building in the UK, and as a result of Sellafield Ltd's underperformance will likely remain extremely hazardous for longer. The report seeks answers from Government on how it will hold the NDA and Sellafield Ltd to account in ameliorating the site's greatest hazards.
Nuclear power created the most hazardous building in the UK.
The cost of nuclear cleanups is staggering.
And still, we pretend that nuclear power is a cost-effective way of generating power.
Who do those making this claim think are fooled by it?
Hat tip to Dr David Lowry
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Sorry Richard but this sounds like a totally uninformed rant.
Nuclear in the UK doesn’t work, for sure. But check out how nuclear works in France and you’ll see that it is possible to make it work.
I’m no nuclear cheerleader and believe absolutely that as much as possible (money and expertise) should be invested into renewables, but to be brutally honest this sounds a bit like a tirade.
You mean the Public Accounts Climate were wrong?
And that we do know where and how to manage nuclear waste?
And that it is not leaking at Sellafield?
And that the costs are out of control?
We’ll have to disagree on this.
Nuclear is an existential threat and no one, the French included, knows how to manage it.
And it’s my blog and I’ll rant if I want to on something I feel such a threat to humankind, and other life.
Nuclear as it is in the UK doesn’t work.
Nuclear in France works incredibly well. Also in other countries.
Nuclear isn’t the issue, how you administer it is the issue.
Silvery John, buit that lain is just naive.
The half life is the same, and threat just as real.
We will have to disagree.
The French had their own issues in the past with nuclear waste but they solved those issues in the meantime.
A combination of recycling, intermediate and long term storage 500m into the earth’s core is what they use.
I think it’s sensible to rant about such a waste of money.
The progress of nuclear power generation had been interesting, and some of our processing costs and problems arise from fears over nuclear proliferation.
It may be worth monitoring the molten salt thorium reactors being developed (e.g. in China), given their features. At the same time, we should argue that large scale renewable energy installation and upgrade of storage capacity is much more certain to reduce energy costs, create energy security, and help net zero.
It would be nice if John provided some links to the French ‘success’ as Richard does for the situation here. There is of course the unavoidable fact that, regardless of safety or not, we (the UK) have to import all our uranium.
The wind and sun arrive at our shores free of charge…
The proven reserves of uranium will only last 90 years at today’s rate of usage and it would only last 4 years if it was used to plug the fossil fuel gap. Breeder programs can extend the resource by large factor but proliferation and bomb dangers become much more pronounced and the waste is an unsolved issue that will persist for thousands of years.
The worry about longer-term Uranium deposits isn’t worth thinking about right now. It is quite feasible to extract it from seawater – the oceans contain billions of tons of the stuff and there is plenty of research ongoing as to how it can be cheaply extracted. As noted, there is also reprocessing of existing used fuel because current reactor designs only use a very small proportion of the Uranium in the rods/pellets. The ever-increasing complexity of new PWR designs such as the bloated and vastly expensive EPRs is a problem.
Nuclear power is very feasible if done properly (as in countries such as France, South Korea and China), even with the wasteful and overly-complicated varieties of Pressurised Water Reactors. The waste issue is also overstated. Vitrification and geological repository far below the water table when done correctly makes it pretty much impossible for there to be any leaks, even if it takes tens of thousands of years for the radioactivity to decay away. If there was some sort of geological disaster intense enough to change the strata of these rocks and expose any of this material, it’s not something we’ll need to worry about as we’ll already be extinct!
As I’ve certainly mentioned on this blog in the past, it would certainly be much better to move on from the PWRs to different designs, such as the LFTR molten salt design mentioned by another poster above which uses Thorium. This element is three times as prevalent as Uranium, doesn’t need any enrichment, the design doesn’t require such massive containment measures (because it’s not pressurised), doesn’t need the same levels of cooling so wouldn’t need to be located next to a large body of water and burns up almost all of the Thorium so the amount of waste is tiny in comparison. The reactor stops when you pull the (drain) plug and any radioactive material then solidifies into an inert salt as it cools. Oh, and the small amount of waste produced decays down to background levels in hundreds rather than tens of thousands of years. Other molten salt designs could potentially be used to ‘burn’ existing waste from PWRs as well, though these are not well-researched as yet.
All this is based on the molten salt reactor experiment carried out in the 1960s by one of the US nuclear labs and pretty much all aspects of the technology are well-understood, but nobody has followed the design to commercialisation. Probably because the manufacturers of reactors make most of their money from the production of fuel for PWRs…
Although nobody looked at the technology for many years (other than one or two small start ups), the Chinese are using the freely-available documentation from the original experiments to design their own. They are also making lots of money from the manufacture and design of PWRs from existing western designs as well. Hopefully, we’ll see molten salt reactors at some point because they really would be a game-changer.
As regards the vast cost of cleaning up Sellafield, I’m certainly not going to argue about that. The UK was one of the main pioneers of commercial nuclear power and the reactors operated there over the decades have all been experimental to some degree, not to mention the fuel storage, reprocessing and so forth. A very ‘dirty’ site.
Which is all a long way of saying that you can’t judge Atomic power as operated in the early years of the technology and the older designs with the modern era! I’m also very much in favour of renewables, but longer-term, having vastly more power available would allow us to do more things and design a ‘greener’ economy to get off fossil fuels as soon as possible.
I heard stuff like this as long ago as 1971
I need not worry I was told
I did not believe those saying so then, and was right not to do so
And so we will have to disagree on this. I’m sorry, but I am not convinced, at all
@ Mariner,
“…Thorium. This element is three times as prevalent as Uranium, doesn’t need any enrichment…”
Could you cite a source, please; that is counter to my understanding. No argument about abundance, but your assertion about enrichment needs qualification, I believe.
Thorium 232 (Th²³²) is not fissile, but through neutron capture (enrichment) Th²³³ can be bred. That goes through 2 rapid beta decays (half-lives of 22 minutes and 27 days respectively) > Pa²³³ > U²³³. Its the Uranium 233 that’s the fuel in molten salt reactors, as Iunderstand it. U²³³ has a half-life of 160,000 years.
One of the byproducts of Thorium enrichment in U²³³ production is U²³². It decays by gamma radiation and you don’t want your vitals anywhere near that. That’s before we consider the rest of the radioisotopes in the decay chains (plural).
Another issue is salts, molten or otherwise, is corrosive. So separation of salts from construction metals is required.
It appears to me that you’ve been fed a PR puff piece; one that’s mentioned all of the advantages, but none of the disadvantages of utilising Thorium.
Much to agree with
In reply to Drew.
The more difficult aspects of a molten salt Thorium design are well-understood and, in fact, had experimentally been mostly solved even before the MSRE programme was closed in the late 1960s.
The corrosion issue can certainly be dealt with using a different alloy (one of which has already been identified) for the pipework. Further testing over a longer term should prove the long term viability of this – which will be one of the things that the Chinese are doing right now.
And, in fact, there are various other (non-Thorium/LFTR) MSRs under development in a variety of countries so the use of molten fluoride salts will certainly have been investigated elsewhere. And we do have more than half a century of additional knowledge of materials science since the MSRE was last operated.
U232 is dangerous stuff. Which is why it would be left in the fuel in the reactor along with the U233 to be burned up for the decades it was operating. Why would any workers need to get close enough to the reactor to worry about the U232? You don’t assume that workers in current nuclear power stations need to be close enough to the fuel in the reactor, so why would it be different in a LFTR? All designs would operate using well-understood processes used in the chemical industry (which also uses molten salts). I understand there is also an issue with a tiny amount of Tritium gas being produced. This can be removed from the salt easily and secured safely.
In fact, the reactor design is all but proliferation-proof, because, even if you somehow managed to remove some U233 out of the loop (which would be almost impossible), any nuclear weapons expert developing a bomb from the fissile material would receive a rapidly fatal dose of radiation from the U232 which is found amidst the U233. You don’t get too many suicidal experts. Oh, the LFTR, would also be able to use the Plutonium and Uranium from decommissioned nuclear weapons as fuel, which would be both cheaper than typical disposal techniques and get some use from the waste. One or two test weapons aside from many decades ago, nobody makes nuclear weapons from U233 because it is too difficult to do so.
My point about reprocessing fuel seems to have been misunderstood. I wasn’t advocating for it, just noting that if we were ever to really run out of viable uranium for ‘traditional’ reactor designs, it could be a source for more. Reprocessing in a LFTR is an ongoing chemical process which removes the spent fuel when additional Thorium is added as new fuel. One ton of Thorium used in such a reactor (which doesn’t require special processing or enrichment) would produce 250 times as much energy as a ton of Uranium in existing PWRs. The small amount of waste would decay to background levels of radiation within a few hundred years. Some of the isotopes produced are used in medicine as well, so it would be a useful source for those – no specialised reactor required.
What else? The LFTR would operate at a temperature which would make high-temperature electrolysis to produce cheap hydrogen very feasible.
Ultimately, if you’re going to need nuclear power (which I think we do, barring a gigantic breakthrough in extremely cheap energy storage), it makes absolutely no sense for at least one government not to develop an LFTR to see how it would work. Especially considering the untold billions being spent of fusion research which has its own problems yet to be solved, even if they manage to get a sustained reaction, which hasn’t been managed yet.
Thankfully, as I said, the Chinese are finally looking at LFTR, after the Yanks shut it down in 1969 because they saw Plutonium breeders as the way forward. We’ll see myriad new SMRs produced in the next few years, all of which will be less efficient, more expensive and will leave much more waste to deal with than a putative LFTR.
It has been such a ‘no-brainer’ that I’m still amazed it hasn’t happened even a couple of decades after I first read about the technology. An example where the markets don’t select the best option – just the easiest.
The big thing here is that this reactor design wouldn’t be comparable to existing nuclear power stations which we know have some very problematic issues. Not acknowledging this and just thinking nuclear power, bad, isn’t logical.
This is not my field…
But I remain unconvinced. Sorry.
Nobody says nuclear cannot generate power. It’s just that it’s a dirty and costly way to do so.
Not to mention the long lead times for anything to be brought to a functioning state.
It would be unwise to assume that nuclear works well in France. It may work better than UK but still doesn’t work well. In the Rhine are seismic activity has shut down reactors on numerous occasions at scales below what they were said to be designed to withstand. Evacuation orders weren’t issued when they were supposed to be I.e. covered up.
So, ‘the radioactive particles are “contained” in the soil and do not pose a risk to the public’. Two strong claims for which some scepticism is warranted, surely.
First, could the PAC (but not the NDC) independently commission a series of boreholes in and around Sellafield to investigate the unusual soil profile in the area? No underground streams?No movement of radioactive particles? Just all contained in a wondrous leak-proof bucket for millennia? Simply too good to be true!
Second, it has always been the case that Sellafield and the NDC say there is no risk to the public, no matter what happens. But they are not the bodies that I would trust to mark their own homework. Again, an independent body is required to assess that – say from Ireland…
Looking at it from an accounting perspective, not that I am an accountant, and I understand that there are major issues with how the UK has handled nuclear waste, given the length of time we have to look after the resulting waste how on earth do you account for the cost.
It seems to me that nuclear power is a classic case of privatise the profits, socialise the costs. In this case of cleaning up and securely storing the mess that is spent nuclear fuel.
Bearing in mind that nuclear fuel, like fossil fuels, is a finite resource that will eventually become exhausted, surely it is better to invest in renewable, cleaner technologies now, rather than later?
Yes, in a word
Thank you, John A.
Let’s not forget the dirty secrets, too:
Import of uranium by Europe and the US from Russia, so exempt from the umpteenth package of sanctions, and export of spent fuel rods to Russia for storage.
Looting of uranium below market price from Niger, although that has stopped, alarming the French elite who are massing troops, with US ones, in Cote d’Ivoire.
John, you shouldn’t be fooled by the partial pro-nuclear propagandist cheerleading that comes from France. At present its one new reactor under construction at Flamanville is at least six years late and three tomes over projected cost. It is currently stalled in construction as a key reactor component is broken even before start up, and it is embedded inside the reactor and proving complex to replace. France has built two different reactor designs in series. Theory suggests they will get cheaper in time, with a positive learning curve. But a detailed analysis by Vienna-based academics published in the journal Energy Policy demonstrated the French nuclear fleet manifested a unique negative learning curve ir the newer nuclear plants developed greater problems and cost more.
The French equivalent of the UK National Audit Office warned EDF, owner of the French nuclear programme, earlier this year that building six new reactors as EDF planned, would incur too high a financial risk. Additionally, the planned final burial project for their radioactive waste, called CIGEO, at Bure, in Champagne country near Reims, has run into development difficulties, increased local communal opposition, and cost escalations. And France is put on a pedestal as the model nuclear nation!
Thank you and well said, Dr Lowry.
EDF stuffed up in Finland, too, and needs to exploit British consumers to shore up its finances. The brother in law of a friend and former CEO of EDF UK and Belgium, both French toffs, explained to me.
Flamanville
Ah ha. Used to rent a flat & the chap above was a nuclear software engineer involved with….Flamenville – ah the stories, the rapidaly escalating costs the .. well lets just say that he was as skeptical as many on this particular post – & he was an insider. He could see no end to the saga in 2012 &… lo it came to pass.
I say Francoise – pass the champers would you. (well somebody gained and it was not the French peasants – it was “L’etat est moi aka EdF).
The EPR is a massively-bloated and over-engineered design which is only ever likely to be troublesome.
Which, of course, is why we’ve decided to get the Chinese to build some for us.
Would have been better off buying proven existing designs from the US or South Korea but that ship has sailed…
A ‘rant’ is certainly needed to break our normalisation of the time-bomb that is Sellafield. I think its recognised as not only as the most dangerous site in the UK but in Europe or the world. The dedication of the UK establishment to nuclear power is part of its commitment to nuclear weapons – which of course is the UK version of the MAGA cult – we are ‘a great power’.
Its as though we are our own suicide bomber strapping ourselves to Sellafield.
Decades ago, my old professor of nuclear physics went on to chair the Royal Commission on environmental Pollution which concluded-
‘There should be no commitment to a large programme of nuclear fission power until it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that a method exists to ensure the safe containment of long lived, highly radioactive waste for the indefinite future.
And since then of course the economics have slid decisively against nuclear in favour of renewables . Even within its own ridiculous ‘private inward investment’ narrative all the govt has to do is to say – yes we agree nuclear is wonderful – and let the private sector get on and build it. Investors would disappear – they would run a mile. It is uninsurable. and each station leaves hundreds of years of dangerous waste. But of course this dumb govt has spent £6bn on Sizewell C already – and is committing the public to be paying the developers £40bn.
The PR has always been ridiculous – nuclear was originally going to be too cheap to measure. Now SMR’s are going to be run off the production line in a few years – as they were saying ……. err…. a few years ago……
Many thanks
Sellafield’s radioactive woes are not a recent phenomenon. In October 1957, the worst nuclear accident ever in the U.K. occurred when the plutonium-production Windscale Piles at modern day Sellafield caught fire, and created widespread radiological contamination across the country, with radioactive particles blown from the accident being measured even in the Netherlands. In the aftermath, U.K. Atomic Energy Authority, owner-operators conducted regional radioactivity monitoring. The lead scientist, Dr H J Dunster, presented a paper on the results at the second United Nations Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva in 1958. In his presentation he revealed after the 1957 accident Windscale’s operators had deliberately discharged liquid radioactive waste from the plant in an experiment so they could monitor how it was transported from the nuclear facility in the Irish Sea. ( the full Proceedings can be Googled)
The lax attitude to public health and radiological safety set in at Sellafield from its earliest years.
What’s more, your approach to both managing the economy and improving democratic accountability is much more likely to achieve success with a new strategy that excludes nuclear than the current system. All we need is a political and institutional revolution to get us there!
There are 12 submarines docked near plymouth, their stays ranging between 22 years and 1 year. Each of these submarines have reactors with fuel still in them. I’m not suggesting that any of these subs are in as decrepit a state as some of the Sellafield estate but many millions have been spent keeping these decommissioned boats sound. Submarines probably represent the Navy’s most potent/useful asset, however having to continue spending very significant sums of money on them 20 years after they retired is not useful.
And it’s dangerous
hadn’t heard about this – it appears the ‘defuelling’ process is taking years for each sub, and no one seems to have said where the removed fuel will go – maybe to Sellafield? You couldn’t make it up.
It looks as though the astute class of subs have seen massive delays and cost overruns – and now one has a ‘contaminated’ reactor.
So now e are going to do it all over again with this new class of 12 dud subs.
Nearly 40 years ago, as one of the staff members licensed to drive the college minibus, I was task with taking a small party of students on a trip to Sellafield. We arrived at the glossy visitors centre, located maybe 2 miles away, and, after the usual PR, were transferred to a coach, accompanied by armed police, and driven to the site.
It was a drab Autumn day. We drove through the gates, and I just couldn’t believe what it was like: a huge tip. We drove past the rotting hulks of long-abandoned buildings, abandoned rusting machinery scattered everywhere, strange bunkers like abandoned WW11 installations. And then it hit me. Nothing could be removed from this dangerous graveyard, and no one knew what to do with it.
Inside vast dimly lit buildings we were led passed what looked like enormous abandoned swimming pools, filled with now radioactive water. How many more must be there today I can’t imagine, nor can I imagine what sort of a state the ones we saw are in now.
It was the most miserable experience of my life.
Thanks for sharing that.
Sellafield (Windscale) is the graveyard of utterly misplaced hopes.
Nuclear is very expensive both today (build and run) and tomorrow (decommission). The stellar increase in electricity consuming data centres brings with it a dramatic increase in the demand for base load electricity.
Wind and solar struggle to compete. But no problem is insurmountable. The huge sums spent on Nuclear could be better spent resolving this problem. Imagine if GB was truly self sufficient in energy – that is a serious defense strategy. But how to achieve this. Any ideas?
At 8.16pm Mariner posted a long contentious screed supporting certain nuclear technologies while dismissing others. He asserted that nuclear power is “feasible if done properly like in (inter alia) France.”
Many hours earlier, at 9.33am I explained how and why the French nuclear success is over-hyped, and detailed several significant technical problems ( but by no means all of them) that have bedevilled the French nuclear programme.Is mariner totally unaware of these in proposing France has done nuclear “properly.”
Mariner also resurrects from its grave the notion that reprocessing spent nuclear fuel has a future.It doesn’t! It has all but been discontinued at Sellafield. Its ‘great white hope’, Thorp, has already been closed down. The mixed oxide ( MOX) plutonium fuel plant it was to serve has been abandoned; all reprocessing at Dounreay on Scotland’s north coast has long been halted. The plutonium recovered from reprocessing, some 140,000 kilogrammes, is in store at Sellafield awaiting de facto ‘reverse reprocessing’, as it will be blended with radioactive waste and immobilised in ceramic or glass matrix to create a stabilised waste form. This will be the main future work for Sellafield for decades to come.
Thanks
I eventually got a nuclear physicist relative (who has visited Los Alamos regularly) to admit that the real reason for nuclear power is to provide enriched uranium for weapons, therefore the cost and cleanup are inconsequential to the military. That’s the sole reason the reactor at Chapelcross near Dumfries was built. Its power-output was simply a by-product. The site is scheduled to be fully decommissioned and cleared by 2095. Since UK governments seem unable to plan even five years in advance, I’d say that date would have to be described as ‘provisional’ at best.
That’s why we use the enriched Uranium reactor. There are other ones but renewables must be the focus.
One example issue that is less discussed is how to provide power in the event of sustained volcanic activity or asteroid impact. Let me be clear I think renewables are the way forward but there are many issues we need to solve. I raise 2 points but there are others.
First, from above, we need a back up that can be easily brought online that will get us through an event for which 24 hours of storage is not enough. It could be gas, for example, not nuclear but we need to plan for events like this. It is definitely unclear, for me anyway, that we are planning for anything beyond CO2 reduction.
Second the renewable system will be more complex. There will be multiple sources of generation and it will have to be developed with a much higher level of assurance as a system to avoid cascade failure than with large generators and a grid. It is currently ad-hoc, as far as I can tell, and as with any badly designed complex system will have a high risk of unexpected emergent behaviour.
I tend to agree that nuclear should not be part of the primary plan as there are significant downsides we know about and information is biased by commercial interests. However, unless we understand where we want to go and as such what we are trying to address nothing should be written off, except continued unmitigated use of fossil fuels.
What we need is energy storage above all else.
Alan Laird: I am afraid you have misunderstood your relative. There is a Siamese twin-like relationship between civil and military nuclear power, but not the one you cite in enriched uranium( although Israeli propagandists continually assert this is happening with Iran’s nuclear programme). The U.K. first generation ( Magnox) reactors were designed to optimise plutonium production for the military at the cost of expensive electricity generation. In other countries like the US, they scaled up light water cooled PWR naval propulsion reactors for the first generation power plants.
Chapel Cross in The South of Scotland was essentially a copy of the Calder Hall Magnox reactors at Windscale (Sellafield). But they were modified to create tritium for H-bomb triggers, by insertion of lithium cartridges. (Interested readers can order my PhD thesis “Nuclear Powers” from the Open University library to find out the very complex details of civil-military inter-linking across 60 years, especially with the US nuclear establishment)
China is developing a variety of types of nuclear power plants. This is their first now commissioned thorium molten salt reactor, in a desert! It pays to look at what China’s doing if you want to see the potential (even a Danish company is exploring its potential as well as the countries mentioned in the article). https://engineerine.com/chinas-thorium-nuclear-reactor-energy-breakthrough/
Carry on ranting, Richard, until someone takes notice.
In the 80s my husband was an architect at Peterborough DC.
When the DC started closing down he was headhunted by Taylor Woodrow to set up an office in Warrington. It turned out that the other person from Glasgow was also a friend of the ex chief architect at Peterborough who now worked for Sellafield.
Taylor Woodrow were after the contract for Pond 5 at Sellafield. They did not get it, so the office was closed down and my husband then had to go and work in London at their head office. We were told that there was lots of other work in the Warrington area, but there wasn’t. Fortunately we had not moved over to Warrington as our eldest son was doing his “O” levels that year.
It looks like Pond 5 is the bit that’s leaking, having been built only 40 years ago.
I hadn’t realised, and I’m sure my husband did not know, that Taylor Woodrow had built 5 nuclear power stations, including Windscale, Hartlepool and Sizewell A.