Britain's Plutonium Mountain
A gentle reminder than one issue will still be with us, long, long after we all are gone
Even someone of my generation can feel rightly pissed off with the bullishly confident and simultaneously paranoid numpties of the 1950’s. I mean we’ve been a stupid, selfish and harmful generation in many ways, (I’m talking about boomers) but we didn’t all accept that nuclear power was the future, that nuclear weapons were vital for our security and that there were no problems using this amazing technology.
With their blind faith in nuclear weapons and their ‘balance of power’ obsessions. They have left us with a right old mess in their former playroom.
These glorious islands we call the United Kingdom house the largest stockpile of civil grade plutonium….. (suitable Clarksonian pause) ….. in the world.
After having v ery positive discussions with people in the newly revived and super confident nuclear industry recently, I have just re listened to an alarming BBC radio 4 program first broadcast way back in 2013.
It’s called called ‘Britain’s Plutonium Mountain and I have a sneaking suspicion the BBC would not make a similar program today. I really hope I’m wrong, but it was very hard hitting and critical of the ongoing problems our nuclear activities have caused.
The cost of dealing with this toxic legacy are too enormous and depressing to recount, listen to the show if you want the figures, however I couldn’t help but speculate for just a bit after I’d heard it.
I admit I’m a dreamer, a barely educated fool and I’m often accused of not living in the real world, however I think we can all agree that the real world that created this particular nuclear nightmare is not a fiscally prudent or sane one.
So bare with me for a short moment of idiotic fantasy. Just imagine if instead of spending uncountable billions on storing this monstrous legacy, with no end in sight, we had, back in 1953, followed the hippy dippy route of developing massive, expensive, hard to connect to the grid offshore wind farms and massive, expensive, hard to construct grid level storage.
We could have spent, say £20 billion of tax payers hard earned money doing this over the last 55 years, that would have been a lot less than we have spent on our nuclear waste storage programs, but where would we be now?
Oh yes, I get it, due to the investment in new and developing technologies, we would have had a massive proportion if not the entirety of our electricity generated with renewable sources. And we would now be a world leader in wind technology, sort of like the Danes have become, and who are now reaping the benefits big time.
We wouldn’t have to import dangerous and expensive fissile or hydrocarbon fuels from dodgy and dangerous sources.
Our economy would be healthier because we’d spent the money to generate that electricity from within our own economy, it would employ tens of thousands of people to construct and maintain the systems.
The environment around us would be safer, we wouldn’t have to deal with this insane stockpile of lethal stuff stored at Sellafield in Cumbria, stuff that will just not go away for hundreds of thousands of years.
But that’s just silly, the real world solution is to continue to spend billions and billions of pounds shoring up an incredibly expensive system because we are buggered if we don’t.
No one from the recently revived pro nuclear lobby ever mentions Sellafield and the incredibly important work the very brave men and women who work there.
The people who have to deal with this hideous inheritance. We all need to be eternally grateful to the brave and resilient armed police officers who guard this deadly stockpile twenty four hours a day at unimaginable cost to the taxpayer.
This isn’t party political in any way, every shade of government for the last 50 years has been sucked into this mess.
And just before you jump on the comments to explain that the latest generation of nuclear power plants do not produce any weapons grade materials and produced far less highly radioactive waste than previous generations of power plants, I know that.
I know because I’ve been to Sellafield a couple of times, and given talks to the incredible engineers and scientists who work there. I have discussed the legacy they have to deal with, I’d stared into those deep pools of potential catastrophe.
Just in case you can’t be bothered to listen to the program, I will précis one bit of our proud nuclear history.
The mountains of the m ost dangerous nuclear waste stored at Sellafield was mainly produced in the immediate post war years, the results of experiment and research into nuclear power and weaponry. No one knew what to do with this highly radioactive material then, and we still don’t know what to do with it now, 70 years later.
Some of if is just going to stay unusable and incredibly dangerous for another few hundred generations, it’s a legacy that’s not going away. So a burst of activity for about 20 years after world war two is going to have to be dealt with by our great X 50 grandchildren.
Of course, it is theoretically possible to combine plutonium with another mildly less dangerous fissile material to create a ‘mixed oxide’ or MOX fuel. The French do it, not really anyone else. This explained in some depth in the BBC radio documentary.
We tried it.
In 1993 we started building a MOX plant at Sellafield with an initial cost of £265 million, but before the massive installation was finished, guess what?
Yes, it ended up a little bit more expensive, £437 million and with one other teeny weeny problemette.
It didn’t work.
Yes, we managed to spend £437 million of our taxpayers money doing sweet FA.
Not only that, it is now going to cost literally billions to decommission the site. Before the MOX plant was finally closed down it had produced just over 1% of what it was supposed to do.
It was described in a memo from the American government revealed by Wikileaks as ‘the biggest technological white elephant in British history.’
You have to laugh or you go mad.
So this wander through our old nuclear wonderland is not an anti nuclear rant, although it may seem that way. I am not now, and never have been against the idea of nuclear generated electricity. I’ve said it many times, if you look at the global stock of nuclear power plants they have proven to be incredibly safe and reliable. Tens of thousands more people have died as a result of us mining, shipping and burning coal.
But we cannot and must not forget that this technology does, even in the latest clean nuclear versions, produce the most deadly waste the human race has ever accomplished.
well written and well-intentioned as always, but I'm not convinced. The actual volume of nuclear waste is not really as big as one imagines, I think. Here in Germany, it sums up to around one warehouse full.
Compare this to the amounts of toxic chemical waste we cannot really dispose of, and it looks quite miniscule.
Oh and speaking of which, do we have a solution for disposing of toxic chemical waste? No, I didn't think so. But still, we tolerate its production, because the benefits of chemical production are pretty obvious.
I think it's obvious too why we need nuclear. The only clear path to de-carbonization is through electrification. And the only baseload-reliable, almost-zero CO2 source of electricity in most countries is through nuclear.
Germany spent trillions on renewables, and turned off nuclear, and the result? Second-highest CO2 per kWh electricity in Europe, second highest prices for electricity.
When you don't have ample and reliable solar or wind, or even better, a high volume of water power, you get: something like 80% coal or gas, with some "nice to have" renewables on top.
Agreed, with hindsight it's obvious what we're left to deal with. My understanding of justifying nuclear energy is it's reliable and can cover the gaps where renewables can't, although I thought in the UK we used gas for that, hence the electricity price being based on gas prices?
But also in hindsight, we'd have a decent rail infrastructure without Doctor Beeching, and an independent space and rocket launch system if Black Knight / Blue Streak weren't cancelled.
We could have invested all our North Sea gas and oil reserves instead of selling off these and raiding the piggy banks with privatisation during the 80's, and we wonder today why the country doesn't have a pot to piss in...!