Sellafield clean-up not closure say BNFL

British Nuclear Fuels has rubbished speculation in today's papers that Sellafield’s Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP) will close by 2010.

According to several national newspapers including the Guardian, the Times, and the Irish Times, the £1.8 billion spent nuclear fuel reprocessing plant will close within seven years as the plant was operating at 50% capacity.

The Guardian reported that the Director of the Sellafield site Mr Brian Watson had said that the plant would switchover from production to a nuclear waste disposal operation, and claimed that the plants days as a reprocessing plant were numbered.

A figure of £30 billion was quoted as the cost of the work envisaged at the Sellafield plant.

However, the closure claim was denied by BNFL spokesperson who said it was not possible to say when the plant would close as by then the plant’s future would be in the hands of the government’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which is expected to take control of the Sellafield site in 2005. Following a government review it is understood that BNFL will be concentrating on clean-up operations and the management of nuclear waste stored at the site.

It is understood that the THORP plant is almost halfway though its current order book which will run out in 2010.

The plant was originally set up in 1994 to reprocess and extract uranium and plutonium from spent fuel rods sourced from Japan and supply fuel for the Magnox nuclear reactor at the site which is scheduled to be shutdown in 2012.

However, Mr Watson was quoted as saying that stockpiles of hundreds of tonnes of fuel at the plant would be more than sufficient to supply the reactor at the site.

BNFL was declared technically bankrupt in 2001 and has liabilities estimated at tens of billions of pounds.

South Down MP Eddie McGrady of the SDLP, a campaigner to have the palnt closed, welcomed today's media reports as a sign that "decommisioning" at the plant had commenced.

The Irish government have also been a strong opponent of the site which is located on Britain’s Cumbrian coastline on the Irish Sea.

(SP)