PLUTONIUM may soon be flown from country to country in flasks which the US
government and international aviation organisations regard as unsafe.
A meeting of an advisory committee to the International Atomic Energy
Agency in Vienna earlier this month endorsed new regulations covering the
transport of nuclear fuel. These would allow fuel made from mixed uranium and
plutonium oxides (MOX) to be flown in flasks that are weaker than those
permitted for other forms of plutonium.
If agreed by the IAEA board of governors later this year, the new transport
regulations will enable more than 10 tonnes of plutonium to be flown from
Britain to Germany over the next decade.
The IAEA says that the new regulations are “more stringent”. However, they
are dismissed as “nothing but a sham” by Paul Leventhal from the Nuclear
Control Institute, a lobby group in Washington DC. “The IAEA is perpetrating a
dangerous fraud on the world public,” he says.
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