Reprocessing the truth

Thus BNFL are careful to choose those critical groups that are not too critical. The authorities chose to ignore those who are forced to spend 24 hours a day near the mud flats, those in Ravenglass village who live in houses fronting directly onto the estuary. No measurements have been carried out to see what amounts of plutonium or other radionuclides they are inhaling. No levels have been fixed for atmospheric discharges.

Do we really have the right to predetermine human behaviour in this way for all time to come? What happens if those living at Ravenglass want to spend more time on the estuary? Or if the locals develop a taste for laver bread? Those and many other options must now be closed forever. The truth is that everybody will eventually fall into the category of a critical group. Moreover many people will belong to several critical groups at once, and what happens to them?

2.11. Spurious Precision

In his report Parker includes a chart indicating the radionuclides discharged during reprocessing and their contribution to maximum permissible levels via critical pathways. Despite the greater intended throughput of spent fuel, THORP is to discharge just over half the quantities of radionuclides of its Magnox predecessor. In view of BNFL’s past record with discharges, and the enormous fluctuations from year to year, in view of its ignorance concerning the fate of radionuclides in the environment, in view of the paucity of research on critical pathways little value can be attached to BNFL’s chart. That figures in the chart are given with extreme precision down to one hundredth of one percent is unimpressive, and can only be regarded as an attempt to mislead the Inquiry.

2.12. Engineering Feasibility of THORP

BNFL has convinced Parker that it will succeed in reprocessing oxide fuel commercially where others have failed, and that it will be able to do so without contravening the authorised discharges laid down by MAFF and the DoE. Professor Barry Shorthouse, an experienced chemical engineer, explained that BNFL was likely to run into severe problems with its proposed pulsed column. Scaling up such columns from the laboratory to large commercial units could lead to all kinds of difficulties, he said, especially in a system where intense radioactive decay would constantly be altering the properties of the solvent. In conventional chemical industries, one can tolerate a bang or two, since in general the damage is limited; one cannot tolerate that kind of incident in a reprocessing plant. Parker preferred the evidence of Warner, BNFL’s engineer to that of Shorthouse.

2.13. Risks

Mr. Parker accepts Warner’s assurances that the chances of a serious accident at Winscale are no more than one in a million. But what were the chances of two jumbo jets colliding on the runway at Las Palmas airport? One in a million? Yet it occurred. What, too, the chances of all the OPEC ministers being kidnapped together at a meeting in Vienna and flown off to Algiers? More than one in a million? Yet it occurred. When we are dealing with a small, inoffensive device like a typewriter an accident is not so serious: when we are dealing with a passenger aeroplane, there is more cause for concern: and in the case of such complex and dangerous devices as a nuclear power station, the risk becomes intolerable.

2.14. A Chapter of Accidents

BNFL’s assurances that the risks of accidents are extremely low cannot be taken at their face value. Hiding behind the Official Secrets Act they have consistently failed to disclose accidents when they occurred. Charles Wackstein has made a study of these accidents from the limited amount of material that has been made available by BNFL. From published material he could only find reference to 28 incidents. BNFL however, have now produced a list of 177, most of them not hitherto disclosed to the public. If the over lap in the second list is eliminated it emerges that a total of 194 accidents and incidents have occurred between 1950 and mid-1977, 11 of which involved fires or explosions and about 45 releases of plutonium. What is more, contingency plans in the event of an accident, were either non-existent or totally ignored.

Wackstein accuses the nuclear industry of failing to learn from experience. But could it ever? W. C. Charmers, formerly a chief engineer at Windscale, makes the point: “I do not think the country can operate with an acceptable standard of safety an extremely dangerous plant like Windscale under current standards of respect for law, national and personal morals and discipline in social and industrial affairs. This has been demonstrated by the fact that the Windscale workforce was prepared to hazard public safety in pursuit of a minor financial objective.” Might not a later generation occupy the plant and threaten sabotage if their demands are not met?

3. Our Energy Future

3.0 Saving Energy

In order to outflank the objectors BNFL stressed from the .beginning that reprocessing was a means of saving energy, since the gleaned uranium and plutonium could be used for fuelling new reactors. Parker liked that argument, and he sets out to show that recovered uranium would be worth more in energy terms than all the best efforts of those producing energy by alternative means – wind, wave, water, sun. According to Parker, recovered uranium if used in AGRs would yield some 15 percent more energy, whilst if the plutonium could be used as well, the total recovered energy would be raised to 30 or even 40 percent.

Without doubt Parker’s figures are over-optimistic, for he assumes that the nuclear industry will be able to used mixed plutonium uranium oxide fuel in thermal reactors. On the basis that only the recovered uranium will be used in thermal reactors, Professor Rotblat reckons that the energy savings will amount to no more than 1 percent of total energy consumption – a paltry amount when the total costs of THORP are taken into account. “As far as helping to fill the energy gap is concerned,” says Rotblat, “reprocessing of fuels from thermal reactors is irrelevant.”

The supplies of uranium which can be extracted economically for use in thermal reactors are unlikely to last much beyond the end of the century should the nuclear power programme proceed as desired by protagonists. Indeed Price of the uranium institute pointed out that the sophisticated techniques used by the oil industry for exploration are not available for seeking out uranium, and discovery of high grade uranium in the future cannot be guaranteed. On that basis recovered uranium through reprocessing would stretch supplies for less than a decade.

3.1. Commitment to the FBR

Parker also insists that the go-ahead with THORP does not constitute a commitment to the fast breeder reactor. He argues that there are sufficient stockpiles of plutonium from the reprocessing of spent Magnox fuel “to keep open the option, not merely of CFR 1 the first commercial fast breeder – but also of a follow on FBR programme of 8 FBRs with a total generating capacity of 10 GW(E).”

Parker’s argument is contorted, for as he well realises, both Magnox stockpiles and plutonium bred in the ,FBRs will be insufficient to sustain an FBR programme beyond the end of the century. No wonder then that he rejects FOE’s demand for a 10-year moratorium on THORP, and urges that the plant be built now to avoid a backlog of AGR fuel, which, if there were a 10 year delay, would have to be reprocessed at four times the rate, sometime towards the end of the century .

THORP in fact makes little sense unless we build FBRs to utilise the plutonium, and as a corollary to that, once we have THORP we will have little choice but to proceed with the FBRs. Hence government approval of THORP is tacit approval of the FBR programme.
But do we really gain by embarking on such a programme? The assumption with FBRs is that they will breed sufficient plutonium from uranium-238 to sustain not only the original plant in fuel but also to provide at the same time for another new plant.

Hence an FBR programme should in theory be capable of growing exponentially. The other theoretical advantage of the FBR is that it can stretch uranium supplies by a factor of 50 or more through its being able to convert the bulk of otherwise unusable uranium into plutonium. Clearly nuclear power protagonists see countries like Britain developing a base of thermal power stations from which FBRs will mushroom.

But not only are FBRs very much more expensive to build than thermal’ reactors, and still more dangerous to operate, it is exceedingly dubious whether they can breed sufficiently fast to sustain themselves in fuel let alone to sustain an additional reactor. It is hoped that the first commercial FBRs will breed sufficient plutonium in 25 years to. fuel themselves and an additional FBR. In fact the prototypes have doubling times in excess of 40 years, and it is not certain whether the breeding rate can be improved in commercial reactors without incurring severe financial and operational penalties. Furthermore, since the lifetime of an FBR is unlikely to exceed 25 years, the original reactor will at best have bred sufficient fuel for its own replacement. It is thus unlikely that breeder reactors will ever be able to generate enough plutonium to increase their original population.

The size of this population must therefore depend entirely on the amount of plutonium obtained from thermal reactors and as we know, by the end of the century, long before a serious programme of breeder reactors can be got underway, world uranium supplies on which these thermal reactors depend, will have been largely exhausted. It must thereby, even in the best conditions, remain an extremely marginal source of energy, very much more marginal that solar, wind or wave generators or any other alternative sources.

At a recent energy conference in Florida, American nuclear physicists agreed that the FBR may prove to be the biggest white elephant of all time, far more so than Britain’s present AGRs or Concorde. Yet in Britain, France and in all likelihood in West Germany, plans are in effect to proceed with FBRs. Parker himself points out that so much time, effort and money has been expended on nuclear power that writing it off at this stage would be almost impossible, hence his need to justify it by spurious arguments of energy conservation and of the likely success of a nuclear power programme.

The marginality of nuclear power is beginning to be appreciated, Professor Carroll Wilson, director of the Workshop on Alternative Energy Strategies, at MIT, asked experts from 15 countries to estimate what proportion – of their country’s energy requirements would be likely to be met by nuclear power in the year 2000. The average answer was 20 percent, and although they took into account logistical problems involved in building power stations and associated facilities, it was taken for granted that the necessary capital would be available.

Since in America many nuclear power station projects are already being cancelled for want of capital, those assumptions seem to be rash. Their calculations also ignored the likely disruption of nuclear development by the increasingly powerful anti-nuclear lobby, whose efforts in Germany have already led to a veritable moratorium on the building of nuclear power stations. Carroll Wilson’s own assessment, allowing for the total range of the problems, was that 10 percent was a more realistic figure; as for FBRs he did not expect them to make a contribution to total energy requirements of more than 0.5 percent.

The case for nuclear power rests on estimates by the Department of Energy that by the year 2000 energy demand in Britain will have increased to between 450 and 560 millions of tonnes of coal equivalent (mtce). Parker accepts that Government estimates may have to come down further than they already have, but he avoids spoiling his case for THORP by admitting that they may come down to the levels forecast by those promoting alternative energy options.

“None of the evidence given, has led me to believe that it would be otherwise than imprudent not to continue to develop nuclear technology and keep the nuclear industry in a condition to meet a sudden expansion in nuclear power should it be required, be that expansion in thermal reactors or in FBRs . . . to divert available resources to such efforts (the alternatives) to an extent which would prejudice a large scale reliance on nuclear power, should it be needed, would it seems to me,” says Parker, “be an act of bad management for which this and future generations might justly blame the government . . .”

Parker, and presumably those in the government forecasting the role of nuclear power, appear to be oblivious to the enormous sums of money – required to sustain a growing nuclear power programme. Nor do they seem to appreciate the ‘tightwoven interrelationship between the fossil fuels and nuclear power. Indeed nuclear power may seem a cheap option, but that is only because its very existence and future depends on the cheapness and availability of fossil fuels. In the past economists fell in the trap of thinking that nuclear power would become cheap relative to the fossil fuels. Once the price of the latter rose substantially. OPEC’s price rises put paid to that notion, and it has now become apparent that inflation has hit nuclear power with even greater effect .than it has other fuel sources.

In Britain if we go ahead with an FBR programme the situation will get worse. Mr. Parker suggests that Britain should build two FBRs (each of 1.25 gigawatts) each year, even if we could find places to site these monsters on our tiny island they are likely to cost something like £2,000 million each at current prices. This means that we will be spending each year 80 percent of all the capital that is presently available for investment in this country just on building two power stations.

We know that the two main constraints to which. our energy programme must be subjected are capital availability and the lead time. There is no question whatsoever that the form of energy that requires the least capital and that can be made available most rapidly is energy conservation. In order to avoid a major economic discontinuity it is in this field that the vast majority of our energies should be concentrated.

As Gerald Leach of the International Institute for Environmental Development pointed out in his very valuable testimony (which was totally ignored by Mr. Parker) the scope for energy conservation is immense, to take one example, satisfactory house insulation could reduce household energy consumption to as little as 40 percent of its present household annual average, and let us not forget that household energy consumption accounts for 30 percent of primary energy use in Britain.

4. Finance

4.0. Good Investment?

Parker accepts BNFL’ s contention that reprocessing is good business. A dry-storage technique for unreprocessed spent fuel, BNFL claims, will cost the customer some £225,000 per tonne compared with its estimated price of £260,000 per tonne of uranium after reprocessing in THORP and vitrification. That latter price assumes a plant big enough to take foreign wastes. Since the uranium and plutonium gained through reprocessing are worth something, Parker subtracts their value from the reprocessing costs and comes up with a figure showing that the customer will save by employing THORP.

All the figures are sheer speculation; none, for example, knows how much vitrification will cost, and it is curious that Parker and BNFL have omitted the costs of long term disposal of the vitrified waste even though they have included those of long term dry storage. Indeed, Professor Tolstoy points out that the cost to the United States of disposing of the million tonnes of solidified waste which will have accumulated by the end of the century might well top $23 billion. Moreover, a recent Swedish government report indicates that the cost of combined reprocessing and disposal may be double that of disposal without reprocessing.

Colin Sweet, an economist, got short shrift from Parker. Why so? Sweet is thoroughly sceptical of BNFL’s costings for the new plant. “The West German nuclear consortium, RWE, estimated recently,” Sweet reports, “that building a new 1,400 tonne oxide plant would incur some £1,116 million in direct costs and £2480 million in total costs to be compared with BNFL’s figures for THORP of £500 million. The URG price for reprocessed fuel is £370,000 per tonne.”

Sweet then shows (See The New Ecologist No. 1, January 1978) that the CEGB’s claim that reprocessing – assuming the Japanese investment in the plant – would cost 8 percent of the total costs of nuclear’ generated electricity, is a blatant underestimate. Sweet’s figure is closer to 20 percent, and that of a much higher total cost figure.

The losses in reprocessing “have been very impressive”, writes Professor Albert Wohlstetter in Foreign Policy (Winter 1977), “General Electric’s Morris, Illinois plant, which cost $64 million had to be abandoned without ever going into operation. The Allied General Nuclear Services plant at Barnwell, originally estimated to cost about $50 million actually has cost $250 million so far, and may take about $1 billion in total to complete in accordance with current requirements. Getty’s Nuclear Fuel Service Plant in West Valley, New York, shut down for modification after about $30 million in gross sales. It might require some $100s of millions just to dispose of the radioactive wastes from its previous work.” If reprocessing is so easy, so safe and so financially remunerative, why were all these, and other, projects abandoned?

If BNFL is to be saved from incurring a vast financial loss it is because Britain is prepared to prostitute herself and take in Japanese waste. During the Inquiry representatives of Friends of the Earth and The Windscale Appeal were allowed to peruse the contract signed between BNFL and its Japanese counterparts, and found the terms extremely favourable to BNFL. Public anxiety over radioactive pollution makes it impossible for the Japanese nuclear industry to proceed with its nuclear programme unless it can export its high-level radioactive waste elsewhere.

For that reason, it is ready to pay anything to get rid of them. “The proposed Japanese export of spent’ oxide fuel for reprocessing in THORP”, says Professor Ichekawa, “is part of a general tendency of Japanese industry to export pollution, such as mercury-polluting factories to Thailand and other Asian countries”. It is indeed sad that Britain should now figure among those countries whose governments are willing or can be cajoled into mortgaging their future for a quick buck.

5. Unemployment and THORP

5.0 Costing the Job

THORP is expected to cost at least £600,000,000 and will provide one thousand new jobs. Parker dismisses as “out of touch with reality” those who argue that the capital cost per job created is inordinately high and that the money can be better spent elsewhere. But does he really believe that Britain can afford jobs at such a price.

Because of increasing numbers of young people seeking jobs, greater employment of women and increased automation, the labour market is now growing by 150,000 to 160,000 a year. If recorded unemployment were to be reduced in Britain to 700,000 (which a few years ago would have been an entirely unacceptable level) by 1981 – two years later than the government once hoped – it would probably be necessary to create between one and 1.9 million new jobs. With capital investment likely to remain under £5 billion per annum, we have only some £13,000 available for each job that has to be created.

The adoption of a ‘soft energy path’, involving investment in solar collectors, wave energy and conservation techniques will provide very many more jobs, both directly and indirectly, than will further commitment to nuclear technology If we are to achieve full employment in Britain then we must reconsider the assumptions on which present employment policies are based. Our government is still committed to the outdated notion that investment in heavy industry is a prerequisite of economic success – and hence of new jobs.

Everywhere we see signs that these industries ate failing arid can only be sustained by injections of government funds. The nuclear industry is tarred by the same brush. If the dole queues are to be diminished, and the unemployed given the jobs they deserve, we must escape from our obsession with capital-intensive industries that we cannot afford. [For a fuller discussion of unemployment see The Ecologist Quarterly, Spring 1978).]

6. Proliferation

6.0. Proliferation and Terrorism

Reprocessing, remarks Professor Rotblat, was developed for the extraction of plutonium for weapon making, and once large quantities of plutonium are shifted around the globe, the risks of proliferation must be increased. Faced with what seems an unanswerable case, Parker, to everyone’s astonishment, insisted that the building of THORP rather than favouring proliferation will actually contribute to its prevention.

He bases his case on his complete confidence in the Non-Proliferation Treaty as a guarantee against the spread of nuclear weapons, but as Professor Rotblat pointed out this has not prevented non-signatories such as France, China and India from developing the bomb. Nor is there anything to prevent a non-nuclear party to the treaty from developing a nuclear device right up to the penultimate stage of actually testing it.

6.1. Britain’s Moral Responsibilities

Even more far-fetched is Mr, Parker’s argument that if Britain does not build THORP other less technically reliable and less socially responsible countries will undoubtedly do so – and hence there would be far less control over the sale of plutonium. As Dr. Cochran,
of the National Resource Defence Council, points out, that argument has all the smugness and self-righteousness of that used in Parliament in the 18th century to defend the slave trade. It was argued that if Britain opted out of the slave trade, she could only relinquish it to her rivals, the Spanish and the Dutch. Thus to ensure the humane treatment of the slaves, Britain should stay in the game.

Nor is it very likely that Third World countries, however politically aggressive, will have either the cash or the technical know-how to build up their own reprocessing plants. If Pinochet’s Chile or Amin’s Uganda wish to get hold of plutonium, they will surely find it easier to buy it on the black market. When the availability of plutonium for sale rests on the construction of just such plants as BNFL proposes at Windscale, how does Parker have the temerity to suggest that Britain’s venture in large scale reprocessing will diminish the opportunities for proliferation?

6.2 Legal Technicalities

Mr. Parker’s final argument on the proliferation issue is equally far-fetched. Affecting a sincere concern with legalistic technicalities, he assures us, on the basis of various obscure clauses in the NPT, that BNFL have an obligation to reprocess spent fuel not only from its own reactors but also from abroad. That such an obligation defeats the very object of, the treaty does not seem to occur to him: his only concern is that our undertakings be honoured. Yet what is at question is not our present obligations but whether any non-proliferation treaty which favours the expansion of nuclear power can be made fool-proof. The history of treaties is, after all, the history of broken treaties.

6.3. Terrorism

‘Horizontal’ proliferation of nuclear weapons by States which hitherto had not. been nuclear is by no means the only conceivable route by which weapons fall into the wrong hands. Clandestine terrorist groups, such as the Baader-Meinhof gang, or the Italian Red Brigade, are already proving themselves capable of striking at the very heart of governments. Dr. Kit Pedlar has indicated that sufficient unclassified information is available in the archives for any motivated physicist to make a crude nuclear bomb. Eminent physicists who have worked with atomic devices find the plans highly credible. Does anybody doubt that today’s terrorists will hesitate to use such a device if they get possession of it?

6.4. Technical Fixes

The very availability of information on how to make an atom bomb is a powerful argument against mass producing plutonium and shipping it around the world. Yet, Parker believes that access to plutonium by subversive organisations can be denied through technical fixes. Characteristically he selects only those arguments that suit his case. Containers with nuclear material can be spiked with radioactive material, suggests Parker, and newly manufactured fuel elements briefly irradiated to make them awkward to handle.

“To return plutonium so spiked”, says Jeremy Bugler in the New Statesman, “BNFL will have to know the design details of each foreign reactor it is serving, fabricate the fuel correctly and then build plant to do the irradiating. Only three years ago the US Regulatory Commission concluded that spiking would not be 100 percent effective against terrorists let alone rogue governments. Slipshod is not too hard a word for this piece of Parker.”

6.5. Civil Liberties

Parker’s treatment of Civil Liberties verges on fascism. He goes further than arguing that surveillance will be necessary if civil liberties are to be protected and our democratic institutions maintained. He states that those who are most vociferous in the defence of justice and liberty may well be setting out to weaken the enforcement of law and order so that they can unobtrusively take over. “A campaign to lessen surveillance, ostensibly to preserve civil liberties, could therefore be mounted by people whose aim was not the preservation of such liberties but increased opportunities to further their own destructive ends.” It seems to have escaped Parker’s notice that other forms of energy do not present terrorists with such golden opportunities for holding society to ransom, and hence do not pose such a threat to civil liberties.

6.6. Ignorance and the Public

According to Parker public anxiety over nuclear power is the result of ignorance. “It is the lack of information which renders some members of the public suspicious of those who operate the nuclear industry and exposes them to anxieties which are needless” he writes. “However irrational and misplaced they-may be anxieties undoubtedly exist and are elements which must be taken into account.” But who is to blame for this lack of information? In dealing with BNFL objectors have found themselves up against a bastion of secrecy. Indeed employees are loyal to the point of dishonesty.

Thus a film shown at the Inquiry, Caging the Dragon, records an interview with BNFL’s safety operator Donaghue, in which he denies that more than 28 accidents had ever occurred at Windscale. Parker does not even note this blatant cover-up. Instead he turns film critic and castigates the film for misrepresenting an accident at Windscale, because it does not record the real thing, using instead clips of a flare stack at a coke works to illustrate the 1957 fire, and pictures from a medical journal to portray a radiation victim. Does he suggest that the fire at Windscale was less violent, or that radiation does not inflict horrific bums?

7. Conclusion

That Parker’s decision was predetermined is clear to anyone who attended the hearings and has studied the testimonies. What was particularly shaII!eful about the Windscale Inquiry was the apparent objectivity of the proceedings, with Parker at all times giving the impression that he was bending over backwards to give everyone a fair hearing.

Yet his report is an ingenious hotch-potch of half-truths; when he could not ignore the arguments of objectors he chose to distort them. Far from allaying the fears of objectors, as Peter Shore would have it, the report has hardened them in their conviction that their battle is not only with BNFL, but with an all-powerful nuclear mafia, which has enlisted the support of scientists, engineers and government officials. Together they constitute a force that not even the Minister of Energy can resist through the normal process.

We cannot doubt that Mr. Justice Parker believes in the policy of perpetual industrial growth and as a result we are all now being asked to support the personal ambitions of a small coterie of scientists and technocrats. There might be some justification for the nuclear power industry if it. could be shown unequivocally that the energy it unleashes is essential. In fact, nuclear power, for all the money it has soaked up, is probably more marginal than any other source of energy.

The more we become committed to it, through the machinations of the policy-makers, the more swiftly shall we find ourselves bankrupted and our social system undermined. What about radioactive pollution? What about derelict nuclear power stations? What about the real risk of devastating accidents, of terrorism and proliferation? Parker has ridden roughshod over these issues.

Since reason and truth no longer prevail at Public Inquiries we must not delude ourselves that the FBR Inquiry will go the way of the objectors. At stake is the very survival of the nuclear industry and with it its bodyguard of powerful friends. They will not be easy to overcome. Nuclear power without the FBR is nonsense; hence any country wishing to perpetuate its nuclear industry has no choice but to push ahead for all it’s worth, in order to make use of cheap uranium to build up sufficient stockpiles of plutonium to power the fast breeder.

We call on all those who object to the FBR to boycott the coming Inquiry and instead commit themselves to a programme of non-violent, civil disobedience. We believe that no option is left to us if the scourge of nuclear power is to be stopped, as it must be, if we are to preserve our country and our planet.

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