From Max Wallis
So how did Britain get into Sellafield’s embarrassing MOX debacle? Focus
quotes Jack Harris, formerly a senior scientist involved in the Central
Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) research on Magnox reactors
(26 February, p 18).
Writing in the latest issue of Science and Public Affairs, his
assessment concluded that the policy of reprocessing to extract plutonium from
used Magnox fuel in order to combine it with uranium in MOX fuel is “entirely
unacceptable, to the point of foolishness”.
Harris first presented the arguments on cost, proliferation and radioactivity
release in an internal CEGB paper in 1977, where he also assessed the dry
storage alternative. As he relates, the CEGB ordered him and his co-author Roger
Nunn to withdraw the paper. And none of a dozen papers on the issue over the
next decade was allowed to be published. These strategic arguments were central
to the decision in the late 1970s to continue reprocessing and press ahead with
BNFL’s £300 million MOX plant (whose start-up is now in doubt) and
£2.8 billion THORP reprocessing plant.
So the sacrifice of a BNFL manager or two, implied by government ministers,
will not remedy the cultural causes of the MOX scandal. A full inquiry is needed
into how the government and BNFL steamrollered the disastrous reprocessing
project. But it has to probe the government and civil service culture that
suppressed—and still suppresses—scientific study, and subordinates
technical assessment to political/ business interests.
maxw@foe.co.uk
