Barcelona (Platts)--7Feb2011/1005 am EST/1505 GMT
The UK's Sellafield Mixed-Oxide (MOX) Plant is "one of the most embarrassing failures in British industrial history," according to a leaked US embassy cable published in The Telegraph newspaper Monday, on the same day as the UK government proposed building a new MOX plant. The nuclear fuel is known as mixed-oxide fuel because it blends uranium oxides with plutonium oxides. The UK government Monday proposed reusing the UK stockpile of 112 mt of civilian separated plutonium as feedstock for new MOX fuel. The US embassy cable was supplied to The Telegraph by Wikileaks, the organization set up to provide an outlet for leaked government and corporate information. The June 30, 2009, US embassy cable said the existing Sellafield MOX plant "continues to be a white elephant for HMG" costing taxpayers GBP90 million ($145 million) a year. It said all the options, whether closing it or keeping it running, would be expensive. "In the meantime, the plant continues to drain resources and is a black mark for the entire industry at a time when HMG is trying to ramp up its nuclear new build efforts," the US embassy cable said. A new MOX plant would be required for the government's proposed reuse of existing plutonium stockpiles because the existing MOX plant at Sellafield has been plagued with problems. Sellafield's existing MOX plant had a target of 560 mt, but has produced only about 15 mt in nine years of operation. Most nuclear fuel powering commercial reactors employs uranium only, but MOX fuel is a mature technology that could provide a means of reducing the UK's huge stockpiles of plutonium, which poses a safety and security risk. The government launched a public consultation Monday setting out reusing the plutonium in MOX fuel as a potential preferred option for managing what is the largest civil stockpiles of plutonium in the world. The alternatives are continued long-term storage of the plutonium or direct disposal into a geological disposal facility for nuclear waste. The government said that a decision to reuse the plutonium in MOX fuel as the preferred option to pursue would not immediately foreclose the other options of continued long-term storage or disposal. All the options carry significant potential costs. Direct disposal of the plutonium would require a large increase in the size of a planned geological disposal facility deep underground and could cost between GBP5 billion-7 billion ($8 billion-11.2 billion) in undiscounted costs. Continued long-term storage would require the construction of new facilities and additional research on the aging and long-term radioactive decay processes of plutonium, the government said. The government estimated continued long-term storage could cost around GBP8 billion in undiscounted costs. Similarly, reuse as MOX would require "significant expenditure" of around GBP5 billion-6 billion for the construction of a new MOX fuel manufacturing plant at Sellafield. The resulting MOX fuel would be worth an estimated GBP2 billion, the government said. At current uranium prices, MOX fuel manufacture is not commercially viable, the government said, and reuse of the plutonium in MOX fuel would thus be seen as a means of disposing of the plutonium, rather than as a commercial operation. The public consultation runs through May 10.--David Stellfox, david_stellfox@platts.comSimilar stories appear in NuclearFuel. See more information at http://bit.ly/NuclearFuel