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| 22/1/08 CORE responds to Sellafield Unions document ‘Fighting For A Future For Sellafield” [ 22 January 2008] |
| CORE’s campaign coordinator Martin Forwood said today:
“In terms of sheer ‘pie in the sky’, this document should have been published on April Fools Day. The GMB’s unsubstantiated claims, deliberate half-truths and U-turns about Sellafield and the prospects for reprocessing and new reactors does it little credit and will have impressed few. The claims: 'Sourcing uranium from abroad has significant environmental consequences …'. The environmental and health impacts of uranium mining have not once – until now - been acknowledged by Sellafield’s Unions over the last 3 decades as being a problem, despite the issue being a central plank of Green groups’ anti-nuclear campaigns over the years. 'Plutonium – in its current form it poses a risk and could ultimately be turned into fissile material in the wrong hands …'. In 30 years of promoting reprocessing and plutonium production and the manufacture of MOX fuel, the Unions and their paymaster BNFL/BNG have consistently denied a) that Sellafield’s plutonium could physically fall into the wrong hands and b) was in a form suitable for terrorist use. Some of Sellafield’s plutonium stockpile cannot now be used in the manufacture of MOX fuel because of its age and the in-growth of impurities. 'Opens up the possibility of securing reprocessing contracts from abroad …'. Reprocessing as a spent fuel management option has been abandoned by most – other than those few countries initiating the construction of their own reprocessing plant and therefore unlikely to send their fuel to the UK. The Lifetime plans for Sellafield state there are no new reprocessing contracts in the pipeline. Any new contract would be subject to Public Inquiry. 'The importance of reprocessing at Sellafield has increased thanks to the new-build announcement …'. Not so, the government specifically de-linked the operation of any new reactors with the reprocessing of their fuel. CORE’s Martin Forwood added: “The whole GMB document smacks of a last-ditch attempt by the Unions to salvage whatever they can from their crumbling Sellafield empire before the site’s uneconomic and environmentally damaging operations are abandoned and the shutters put up on 50 years of mishap and mismanagement. The comatose THORP reprocessing plant and the moribund Sellafield MOX plant have already served as a costly lesson to most – a lesson unlikely to be repeated whether or not new reactors are built in the UK”. |
