A leak of highly radioactive nuclear fuel dissolved in concentrated nitric acid, enough to half-fill an Olympic-size swimming pool, has forced the closure of the Thorp reprocessing plant at Sellafield in northern England.
The highly dangerous mixture, containing about 20 tonnes of uranium and plutonium fuel, has leaked through a fractured pipe into a huge stainless steel chamber which is so radioactive that it is impossible to enter.
Recovering the liquids and fixing the pipes will take months and may require special robots to be built and sophisticated engineering techniques devised to repair the ?2.1 billion (US$4.0 billion) plant.
The leak is not a danger to the public, but is likely to be a financial disaster for the taxpayer since income from the Thorp plant, calculated to be more than ?1 million a day, is supposed to pay for the clean-up of redundant nuclear facilities.
The closure could hardly have come at a worse time for the nuclear industry. Britain is struggling to meet its target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent of 1990 levels by 2010, despite a substantial program of wind-farm construction, while generating capacity will also be hit by the rundown of some of Britain's coal-fired power stations.
The decision on whether to build a new generation of nuclear power stations is among the most sensitive British Prime Minister Tony Blair faces at the start of his third term in government.
A leak of a briefing paper to ministers on the nuclear option yesterday revealed that the contribution new nuclear capacity could make to cutting greenhouse gases had not yet been considered because of opposition from Margaret Beckett, the secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs.
The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), which took over ownership of the plant from British Nuclear Fuels on April 1, has a ?2.2 billion cleanup budget for this year, its first year of operation, of which ?560 million was to come from the Thorp plant.
NDA spokesman Richard Flynn said, "If the income from the plant is not forthcoming then obviously it will put back plans for cleaning up."
On Friday the British Nuclear Group, a management company formed to run the Sellafield site on behalf of the NDA, held a meeting with the government safety regulator, the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate, to discuss how to mop up the leak and repair the pipe.
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