Britain has a stockpile of plutonium and uranium that, if converted to fuel, could be worth nearly £160 billion and power three nuclear reactors for 60 years, scientists say.
The future of the stockpile – largely left over from burning fuel – will be decided by ministers over the next year, The Times has learnt. Its value is estimated as the equivalent of 2.6 billion barrels of oil. (more…)
CHARLOTTE – Duke Energy has removed test bundles of mixed-oxide or MOX fuel from its Catawba nuclear plant on Lake Wylie as it investigates unusual physical changes in the assemblies.
Anti-MOX groups say the halt means the testing should start all over again, delaying by years a billion-dollar federal program to use surplus weapons plutonium at Catawba. (more…)
VIENNA, Aug 4 (Reuters) – A small amount of plutonium leaked in an ageing International Atomic Energy Agency laboratory outside Vienna but radioactive contamination was contained to a storage area and no one was injured, the U.N. watchdog said. Last year the IAEA director warned that its main analytical lab built in 1970 was outmoded and no longer met U.N. safety standards, and he called for 27.2 million euros ($42.4 milion) in extra funding from member states to modernise it. (more…)
Top-secret shipments of weapons-ready plutonium through British waters have been stopped, after their exposure by The Independent on Sunday. The Department for Transport (DfT) said last week that it had taken “regulatory action” to prohibit the shipments from Sellafield to Normandy on an unarmed old roll-on, roll-off ferry, with few safety or security features. The prohibition, the first of its kind, was imposed after complaints by the French nuclear safety authorities.
The shipments – denounced by nuclear weapons experts as “madness” and “totally irresponsible” – were carrying hundreds of kilograms of plutonium-dioxide powder, described as the ideal material for terrorists seeking to create a nuclear explosion or make a dirty bomb. Only 10kg of the plutonium, experts claim, would be needed to make a terrorist atomic weapon. (more…)
Robot submarines are to be used to sweep particles of plutonium and other radioactive materials from the seabed near one of Britain’s biggest nuclear plants in one of the most delicate clean-up operations ever in this country.
Each submersible will be fitted with a Geiger counter and will crisscross the sea floor to pinpoint every deadly speck close to Dounreay on Scotland’s north coast before lifting each particle and returning it to land for safe storage. (more…)
In the Stockholm suburb of Agesta, a small rock hillock rises amid pine forests and horse farms. It might be just another playground for Scandinavian climbers but for one startling feature: Protruding from the top of the mound, like a missile peeking from a silo, is the conical tip of a nuclear reactor cooling tower.
Thirty years ago, this 65-megawatt reactor buried 50 yards deep and capable of sizable plutonium production was a key component of a vigorous Swedish program to develop a nuclear bomb option, a project that at its Cold War height secretly employed 350 scientists and technicians at the Defense Ministry. (more…)
