The UK government has announced that British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL) can start operating its MOX (mixed oxide) fuel fabrication plant at Sellafield in Cumbria. The decision ends more than four years of uncertainty. The plant was completed in 1996. The facility will take reprocessed plutonium from British Nuclear Fuel Ltd’s Thorp complex and mix it with uranium to make the MOX fuel.
The decision is still controversial and has attracted criticism from anti-nuclear campaigners and those who claim it represents a terrorist target. Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace are taking advice with a view to challenging the decision in court. The approval is also likely to disappoint the Irish government which is concerned about nuclear waste levels in the Irish Sea and wanted a delay while an international investigation was carried out.
The arguments in favour of the plant appear to be largely economic. Approval of the project will prove a net economic benefit of 200 million euros, an independent study claimed, while refusal would cost 58 million euros. However opponents argue that this does not take into account $470 million already spent on the project which the government asked to be treated as sunk costs.
Meanwhile the government’s energy review team has concluded that nuclear generated power will remain uneconomic in the UK unless electricity prices rise. By 2020, it concluded, nuclear electricity will cost more than that produced by wind farms and will be roughly comparable with that produced by green power plants burning energy crops. Coal will be competitive with nuclear power, even after exhaust gas cleanup, while gas-fired power plants will remain the most economical.
All but one of the United Kingdom’s nuclear power plants – Sizewell B in Suffolk – are scheduled to be closed down by 2023. New nuclear capacity is being considered as one way of meeting expected demand over the next 50 years. However the forecasts from the energy review team make it unlikely that additional nuclear capacity can be justified on purely economic grounds.