Sellafield: inside the big clean-up; It's a dirty business but someone has to remove the radioactive waste, writes Danny Fortson

Danny Fortson 1243 words14 February 2010The Sunday Times
(c) 2010 Times Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved


Bill Poulson had been in his new job barely two weeks when a radioactive leak ruined his day.

The American executive had moved from his home in South Carolina to the rural tranquillity of Cumbria to become head of the consortium that has been handed control of Sellafield, the 700-acre site that houses two-thirds of Britain's radioactive waste.

He knew it was a big job. Sellafield has been called the most contaminated industrial site in western Europe and has a long history of accidents, project delays, and spending overruns that have cost taxpayers billions.

Environmental campaigners and other countries have demanded that it be closed.

Poulson's company, URS Washington, along with partners Areva of France and Amec, the British engineering giant, were chosen by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) to see if they could succeed where the government had failed.


The pressure to succeed is immense, and not just because of the size of the contract — £6.5 billion over five years. Britain has bet its future energy security, and climate-change targets, on a plan to build a new generation of nuclear reactors. Yet it has not cleaned up the legacy of its last big nuclear expansion.



Some of the radioactive waste at Sellafield has been sitting around since the 1950s. "Getting the world to know that this is being fixed will underpin the public confidence that is needed as new nuclear gets going," said Poulson.



If he had any doubts about the scale of the challenge, these were dispelled when he found out about the leak last January. The "steady drip" from a pipe had been detected 14 months earlier but was ignored.



"We need to have a change of culture here," said Poulson, "and that incident helped us push harder on changing to a no-tolerance approach."



He is pushing against decades of mismanagement and a "lack of urgency" endemic at a site that had been regularly passed from one government agency to another. Nuclear Management Partners, as the new consortium is called, has brought in about 120 people, including a group of old nuclear hands that Poulson calls "saltydog grey beards", or more prosaicly "change agents", to crack the whip on lax practices.



A year later the victories remain small. Sellafield employs 12,000 people. "When we got here there were pockets of excellence, but others weren't so good," said Poulson. "Relations with the regulator were acrimonious. The site operated in silos, not as a single entity. Project delivery was in some cases years behind schedule." He added: "We are trying to get everyone to pull in the same direction."



In the late 1970s the government hatched a plan that it hoped would change Sellafield's fortunes. The idea was to convert the site from a costly nuclear waste dump to a profitgenerating enterprise. The thermal oxide reprocessing plant, or Thorp, was at the centre of the plan. It opened in 1994, 16 years after it was approved, at a cost of £1.8 billion.



From the outset it was riddled with problems. It is one of only two plants in the world capable of turning waste, from Britain as well as from continental Europe and Japan, into usable fuel. It has never processed the 1,000 tonnes of uranium per year it was designed for. In 2005, 83,000 litres of nuclear waste leaked from a cracked pipe. Last year it processed just over 200 tonnes. International orders have dried up.



Given the risks and huge costs involved, some observers argue that the plant should be shut down altogether. "The rationale for building a reprocessing facility [Thorp] in the 1970s was that there was going to be a boom in nuclear power and a shortage of uranium. Neither of those happened," said Martin Forwood, head of the local campaign group Core, or Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment. "It is unnecessary, creates huge amounts of waste, as well as transport risk and radioactive discharges into the local air and water."



Getting the plant running smoothly is a key part of the NMP's mission. Visitors will find that it all looks very calm. There is no glowing ooze in the holding ponds or men walking gingerly in protective suits. Inside Thorp, its two holding ponds — there are six at Sellafield — look like Olympic swimming pools, with metal boxes a bit bigger than washing machines stacked in neat rows across the bottom.



These boxes contain spent rods of uranium and its byproduct plutonium. They will give off radiation for hundreds of thousands of years to come; the water acts as a natural barrier.



They will remain there for at least three years to cool down a bit before the fuel assemblies inside are recycled in a complex process carried out by robots and engineers behind concrete walls that are two metres thick.



The most dangerous byproducts are separated out, encased in glass, and locked in tubes under lead and concrete plugs. A shipment of the latter, called high level waste or HLW, left last month for Japan. It was the first such shipment, years later than envisaged.



Thorp's neighbouring plant, known as Mox because of the mixed oxide fuel it produces, is even more problematic.



It opened in 2001 at a cost of more than £600m. The objective was to take the uranium and plutonium powder from Thorp and elsewhere to produce new fuels. It was meant to produce 120 tonnes of fuel a year. It has managed only 9.5 tonnes since 2001. The consortium is trying to improve its performance but the government may still decide to mothball the plant.



The NDA is keeping a close eye on things. It has more than 100 measures on which it grades the consortium's performance. Any slippage allows it to cut the payout. If the consortium does well, it can extend the contract for 12 more years, which could take its total value to £22 billion.



Ultimately, a safe clean-up of Britain's nuclear legacy is in everyone's interest. "They have got off to a good start, now we want to see more," said Tony Fountain, NDA chief executive. "This is not meant to be a cosy relationship. We'll do our part as a very demanding customer."


Britain's toxic legacy
Private companies have taken over Sellafield in Cumbria, where two-thirds of our nuclear waste is kept
1 Casks of spent nuclear fuel are kept in ponds for at least three years. The water provides a radiation barrier
2 The casks are opened, and the uranium rods removed. The rods are cut into pieces a few centimetres long
3 The pellets are dissolved in a nitric acid bath
4 The solution is chemically separated, leaving uranium and plutonium powders that can be re-used in the nuclear cycle. The remaining highly radioactive liquor is then transferred to an evaporator
5 The liquor is evaporated into a toxic black powder and mixed into molten glass
6 The glass is poured into stainless steel canisters. These give off 2000 'sieverts' per hour - 10 'sieverts' is lethal - and can get as hot as 200C. They are kept in a store under caps of concrete and lead 2.5 metres thick 97% 3% Uranium Plutonium 'Liquor' 1,000C