Sellafield ‘lost’ 30kg of plutonium
Enough plutonium to make seven or eight nuclear bombs went ‘missing’ from Sellafield nuclear plant last year, new figures suggest.
Annual audit accounts due to be published today reveal that 30kg of plutonium was classified as “material unaccounted for” in 2004, The Times reports.
British Nuclear Fuels, which operates the plant, is expected to dismiss it as a “paper loss”, while the Department for Trade and Industry said it was due to “a new accounting system”.
The discrepancy marks a significant increase from that recorded at the Cumbrian plant the year before, where 19kg was lost. Sellafield nuclear site, Britain’s largest, reported a cumulative loss of about 50 kg over the past decade.
“They make this claim of an auditing problem but I would expect them to be overzealous in the current climate of fears about terrorism,” independent nuclear consultant John Large told the newspaper.
Lost plutonium does not necessarily imply that material has been diverted for sinister reasons. At each stage of the reprocessing procedure, the amount of plutonium contained has to be estimated remotely because of the radioactivity involved.
This imperfect process means there are inevitably problems balancing the amount of nuclear material that goes in and out of Sellafield at the end, although the discrepancy is rarely this large.
“There will always be some material unaccounted for but this is a dramatic development,” said Dr Frank Barnaby, a specialist in nuclear weapons.
However, given the huge amount of nuclear material reprocessed at Sellafield, the 30kg lost accounts for only about 0.01 per cent of it: well within International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) permitted levels of three per cent.
“The point is none has gone missing and none has gone from the site,” a source told the newspaper.
Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrats environment spokesman said that the nuclear industry had some serious questions to answer.
Mr Baker said: “If this plutonium really has gone missing this is a very serious issue. If the figures are wrong then this looks like serious incompetence from an industry that deals with highly dangerous resources.”
