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Radioactive materials disappear in UK over last decade

RT | May 6, 2013

The UK’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has released papers under the freedom of information act, revealing that radioactive materials have gone missing from businesses, hospitals and universities more than 30 times in the past 10 years.

The papers revealed by the HSE, the UK government’s safety watchdog, list some big names in British industry as amongst the culprits including Rolls-Royce Marine Power Operations in Derby, which makes the reactors for Britain’s nuclear submarines, it was reported in The Guardian on Monday.

Small pellets of highly radioactive Ytterbium-169 were lost from the Rolls-Royce marine division, while a 13kg ball of depleted uranium went missing from the Forgemasters steel works in Sheffield, The Royal Free hospital in London lost caesium-137 used in cancer treatment. A report into the incident found that it “had the potential to cause significant radiation injuries to anyone handling [it] directly or being in the proximity for a short period of time.”

In another case, materials containing caesium-137 were lost on a North Sea oil rig by the oil services firm Schlumberger.

While at the site of the former atomic energy research center at Harwell near Oxford, cobalt 60 was found under a tube store under a machine during clearance.

Earlier this year a small canister of iridium-192 was stolen from a van in Lancashire, but was later found at a nearby retail park almost a month later.

“The unacceptable frequency and seriousness of these losses, some with the potential for severe radiological consequences, reflect poorly on the licenses and the HSE regulator. I cannot understand why it is not considered to be in the public interest to vigorously prosecute all such offences,” John Large, an internationally consultant to the nuclear industry, told The Guardian.

“Such slack security raises deep concerns about the accessibility of these substances to terrorists and others of malevolent intent,” he said.

While the HSE successfully prosecuted the Royal Free Hospital, Shlumberger and the massive Sellafield nuclear plant, other organizations have got away with written warnings.

In the case of Sellafield, the nuclear reprocessing facility pleaded guilty at Workington magistrates to sending mixed general waste, such as plastic, paper and metal from controlled radioactive areas to the Lillyhall landfill site in Workington when it should have been sent to the low-level waste repository [for low level nuclear waste] at Drigg, Cumbria.

The science departments of York and Warwick universities were luckier; they received written advice over losing radioactive materials during science demonstrations.

While the Loreto high school in Manchester is being investigated over the loss of americium-241.

“Some of these radioactive sources are very persistent, for example the Royal Free hospital’s lost caesium-137 has a half-life of around 30 years, so it remains radio-toxic for at least 10 half-lives or about 300 years,” said Large, who led the nuclear assessment risk for the raising of the destroyed Russian nuclear submarine Kursk in 2001.

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UK nuclear site shutdown totals $160bln amid cost overruns

RT | February 4, 2013

Decommissioning one of the “most hazardous” nuclear sites in Europe has already cost Britain $106 billion, and further expenses are expected, officials have said. Sellafield chiefs have come under fire for missed deadlines and inflated salaries.

­Sellafield, the nuclear reprocessing site in Cumbria, northwest England, stores 82 tons of plutonium waste. A plant director called one of the plant’s buildings, B30, “the most hazardous industrial building in Western Europe.”

The closure was announced in June 2012, following concerns over terrorist threats and environmental damage.

The total lifetime cost of decommissioning and clean-up has hit £67.5 billion ($106 billion), the Public Accounts Committee said in a new report – two-thirds the total amount the UK spent on the National Health Service in the years 2011 and 2012, and nine times the spending on the Teacher Pension Scheme in the same time period, Guardian Data reported in its annual audit of UK government spending.

The report, published on Monday, highlighted “critical problems” with both the clean-up attempt and the costs of removing hazardous radioactive waste. The Sellafield clean-up was severely criticized by a Commons Select Committee, which commented on the PAC report.

“An enormous legacy of nuclear waste has been allowed to build up on the Sellafield site. [And] there’s no indication of when that cost will stop rising,” Chair of the Committee of Public Accounts Margaret Hodge MP said in a statement released along with Monday’s report.

Hodge added that 12 of 14 major projects at the plant were behind schedule, and five are over budget, posing severe risks to both people in the area and the environment. “Basic project management failings continue to cause delays and increase costs,” the Commons Select Committee said.

The ‘Prospect’ trade union called for closer scrutiny of Sellafield’s owners. The report said that nuclear executives from private companies have received a “reward for failure”, and are being paid “huge salaries”, averaging £690,000. One director was paid just over £1.2 million, according to the report.

“We need more evidence that the salaries paid to NMP senior directors match their actual performance within the company. Closer scrutiny would ensure that the public is actually paying for expertise that brings added value to the clean-up operation and not just bolsters NMP Ltd’s reputation,” Mike Graham, Prospect’s national secretary, said in a press release.

The report came the same week that court action was taken against Sellafield over its illegal dumping of nuclear waste in a local landfill. On Thursday, a court case will open in which the nuclear operator will be accused of breaching environmental permits when it dumped four bags of nuclear waste in a landfill at nearby Lillyhall, without any authorization.

“Furthermore, now that Cumbria county council has ruled out West Cumbria as the site of the proposed geological disposal facility, a solution to the problem of long-term storage of the waste is as far away as ever,” the committee said.

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