[A-List] Destructive creation: nuclear power

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

Dangerous waters

By shipping plutonium around the world, Britain is courting catastrophe

George Monbiot
Tuesday June 11, 2002
The Guardian

The world now faces two imminent nuclear threats. The first is the
stand-off between India and Pakistan, two nuclear powers vacillating on
the brink of war. The second arises from a commercial deal between the
United Kingdom and Japan.

At the end of this week, two British ships will pull into the port of
Takahama to collect enough plutonium to make 17 atomic bombs. Although
the transport of nuclear material within Japan has been halted during
the World Cup, as there are not enough police to guarantee its safety,
the power behind this shipment permits no such considerations. The
plutonium will be transported 18,000 miles through some of the roughest
and most dangerous seas on earth back to Britain, where it will be
repacked and returned to Japan.

The security of the shipment has been described by the definitive
defence briefing, Jane's Foreign Report, as "totally inadequate".
Britain and Japan are to launch, in the form of the two freighters
carrying the material, a pair of floating dirty bombs, waiting for a
detonator. And they are doing so for reasons that have nothing to do
with economics and nothing to do with defence, but everything to do with
a politics which is as mad and dangerous as their mission.

The cargo they will collect is a consignment of mixed plutonium and
uranium oxides - Mox for short - which was delivered by British Nuclear
Fuels Ltd to Japan, where it was to have been used as reactor fuel. The
Japanese discovered that BNFL had falsified its records, and demanded
that the company retrieve it.

BNFL, which is a state-owned company, must comply if it is not to lose
future markets for its Mox fuel. It must defend those markets in order
to justify the government's decision in October to allow the Mox plant
at Sellafield in Cumbria to open. The Mox plant opened in order to make
sense of the reprocessing operations at Sellafield, which extract
plutonium and uranium from nuclear waste. The reprocessing was permitted
in order to provide a reason for Sellafield's continued existence.
Sellafield exists in order to keep the British nuclear power programme
running. The British nuclear power programme exists because _ well, it
exists because it exists. There may once have been a reason, but if so
it has been lost in the mists of time.

Britain's nuclear policy, in other words, is like the old woman who
swallowed a fly. Every solution is worse than the problem it was
supposed to address. Every new justification ratchets up the probability
of a major nuclear accident or breach of security. Yet the programme's
institutional momentum carries all before it.

This programme can sustain itself only until the public grasps the two
unavoidable facts of nuclear power. The first is that there is, as yet,
no safe means of disposing of the wastes it produces. The second is that
even if one were found, the monitoring and safe management of these
wastes requires 250,000 years of political and economic stability. No
government on earth can guarantee five.

It is the British government's attempts to prevent us from grasping
these truths which now expose the world to the threat of both nuclear
proliferation and nuclear terrorism. Reprocessing has bequeathed to the
UK the biggest plutonium stockpile in the world: 60 tonnes of our own,
and 10 tonnes of other people's. The entire stock, as the government's
security review board discovered in January, is stored at Sellafield in
buildings scarcely more robust than garden sheds. Thirteen kilogrammes
of plutonium is enough to make an atom bomb.

Turning this plutonium into Mox is presented as the solution to
proliferation. Unhappily, it introduces four further problems. The first
is that the Mox process generates still more nuclear waste. The second
is that, like every other aspect of the nuclear industry, it costs far
more to produce, when all expenses are taken into account, than it can
ever recoup. The third is that hardly anyone wants to buy it, as most
nuclear power stations use the safer and much cheaper low-enriched
uranium. The fourth is that the only certain market is on the other side
of the world.

Japan has its own warped institutional reasons for engaging in this
trade. Its fast-breeder programme, which was to have used the plutonium
extracted from the waste it sent to Sellafield for reprocessing,
collapsed after an accident in 1995. But it remains contractually bound
to BNFL to reimport its plutonium. So it has asked the company to turn
it into Mox, which it can use (at considerable hazard) in its light
water reactors.

The dirty bombs BNFL is about to launch on the high seas will be, it
hopes, among the first of many. To avoid creating the impression that
this freight might possibly be dangerous, Japan has insisted that the
ships have no military escort. They have weapons on board, but neither
the radar-guided anti-missile defences nor the speed required to evade
an attack by a fast boat.

To spread plutonium across an entire region, terrorists need only send a
missile or boat like the one Bin Laden used to attack the USS Cole,
equipped with the right explosives, into the side of one of the
freighters. The Mox fuel is stored in containers which can resist
temperatures of 800C for 30 minutes. Fires on ships, as the Ecologist
magazine has pointed out, can burn for 24 hours at 1,000C.

Stealing the material is a matter of overwhelming the 26 British
policemen on board and blowing the hatches off, a task well within the
capabilities of several terrorist groups and all of the world's aspirant
nuclear states. The plutonium and uranium can be separated with chemical
processes less taxing than the manufacture of designer drugs.

So the UK and Japan are investing billions in security, and billions in
insecurity. Neither government dares challenge the nuclear monster it
has created. Using taxpayers' money to charm, cajole and threaten both
the government and the taxpayer, this self-serving, self-reproducing
industry, which makes nothing which could not be made more cheaply
elsewhere, has secured such resources, such concessions, such flat
contradictions of policy that we have ended up sponsoring the major
threat to our own security.

When power resides with private companies, the British government will
nest with them and raise their young. When it resides with a state-owned
monster which would not have looked out of place in Brezhnev's Russia,
the same government will happily mate with that monster. One moment it
will warn of such threats to our security that the police must have
access to our email accounts, protesters must be classified as
terrorists and Afghanistan must be bombed; the next it will dismiss such
concerns as nonsense in order to ship plutonium round the world in
civilian freighters.

The nuclear industry must be destroyed before it destroys us. We must,
in other words, wrench political power away from nuclear power.