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A plan to build a plutonium-burning reactor at Sellafield
in Cumbria has been rejected by the UK government's Nuclear
Decommissioning Authority (NDA).
Internal emails seen by The Guardian reveal that the
NDA
regards the reactor technology as immature and commercially
unproven. It would also create large amounts of plutonium-contaminated
waste and increase the risk of terrorists acquiring nuclear
weapons, the NDA says.
The reactor plan was announced by General Electric (GE) Hitachi
in November as a way of converting the UK's 82-tonne stockpile
of plutonium at Sellafield into power.
Known as 'PRISM' (Power Reactor Innovative Small Modular),
it is a new design of sodium-cooled fast reactor that is fuelled
by plutonium.
In an email to GE on 29 November 2011, the NDA's strategy
and technology director, Adrian Simper, said that the two
organisations "have struggled to reach a clear agreement on
the work necessary to demonstrate credibility, without which
neither NDA nor government can consider Prism further in the
development of our strategy."
In a draft response to GE prepared for the Department of
Energy and Climate Change (DECC), the NDA said it had carried
out a "high-level assessment" of PRISM. The technology was
"still to be demonstrated commercially", it concluded, and
"the technology maturity for the fuel, reactor and recycling
plant are considered to all be low".
One drawback with PRISM, according to the NDA, was that it
would be fuelled by plutonium metal, rather than the oxide
form in which UK plutonium is currently stored. Converting
the oxide to metal would result in "a likely large amount
of plutonium contaminated salt waste requiring management".
Plutonium metal is also thought to be easier to make into
bombs. "This would introduce more security/proliferation risk,"
warned the NDA. "In summary, the PRISM concept is unlikely
to start before 2050 and, as such, does not appear to meet
the requirement for deployment within 25 years."
Jean McSorley, a Cumbria-based nuclear critic, obtained the
emails under freedom of information law.
GE said that there had been "miscommunication" about PRISM,
which had been under development in the US for 30 years. "We
haven't had a chance to explain it yet," the company's chief
nuclear engineer, Eric Loewen, told the Guardian. "We're
working on a framework with the NDA."
However, DECC said that the alternative of turning plutonium
into mixed oxide (Mox) fuel was "the most credible and technologically
mature option", so it was prioritising work on that. "We are
not closing off alternatives," added a DECC spokesman. "We
remain open to any technically mature proposals that offer
better value to the taxpayer and can be delivered in within
a comparable timeframe as our preferred option."
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