http://www.smh.com.au/news/World/Radioactive-leak-hits-Britain-in-pocket/2005/05/09/1115584909836.html
Radioactive leak hits Britain in pocket By Paul Brown in London May 10, 2005 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 a reprocessing plant 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 that is so radioactive it is impossible to enter. Recovering the liquids and fixing the pipes at the Sellafield plant will take months and may require special robots to be built and sophisticated engineering techniques devised to repair the �2.1 billion ($5.1 billion) plant. The leak is not a danger to the public but is likely to be a financial disaster for the taxpayer because income from the 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 per cent 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 the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, faces at the start of his third term in government. A leak on Sunday of a briefing paper to ministers on the nuclear option revealed that the contribution that new nuclear capacity could make to cutting greenhouse gases had not yet been considered because of opposition from the Environment Secretary, Margaret Beckett. On Friday the British Nuclear Group, a management company formed to run the Sellafield site, held a meeting with the government safety regulator, the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate, to discuss how to mop up the leak and repair the pipe. The company has to get the inspectors' approval before proceeding. A problem at the plant was first noticed three weeks ago, when operators could not account for all the spent fuel that had been dissolved in nitric acid. Remote cameras scanning the interior of the plant found the leak. Although most of the material is uranium, the fuel contains about 200 kilograms of plutonium, enough to make 20 nuclear weapons, and must be recovered and accounted for to conform to international safeguards aimed at preventing nuclear materials falling into the wrong hands. The Guardian ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Take a look at donorschoose.org, an excellent charitable web site for anyone who cares about public education! http://us.click.yahoo.com/_OLuKD/8WnJAA/cUmLAA/TySplB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: [email protected] Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. OSINT, as a part of The Intelligence Network, is making it available without profit to OSINT YahooGroups members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of intelligence and law enforcement organizations, their activities, methods, techniques, human rights, civil liberties, social justice and other intelligence related issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. We believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
