This programme can sustain itself only until the public grasps the two unavoidable facts of nuclear power. The first is that there is, as yet, no safe means of disposing of the wastes it produces. The second is that even if one is found, the monitoring and safe management of these wastes requires 250,000 years of political and economic stability. No government on earth can guarantee five.
It is the British government's attempts to prevent us from grasping these truths which now expose the world to the threat of both nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism. Reprocessing has bequeathed to the United Kingdom the biggest plutonium stockpile in the world: 60 tonnes of our own, and ten tonnes of other people's. The entire stock, as the government's security review board discovered in January, is stored at Sellafield in buildings scarcely more robust than garden sheds. Thirteen kilogrammes of plutonium is enough to make an atom bomb.
Turning this plutonium into Mox is presented as the solution to proliferation. Unhappily, it introduces four further problems. The first is that the Mox process generates still more nuclear waste. The second is that, like every other aspect of the nuclear industry, it costs far more to produce, when all expenses are taken into account, than it can ever recoup. The third is that hardly anyone wants to buy it, as most nuclear power stations use the safer and much cheaper low-enriched uranium. The fourth is that the only certain market is on the other side of the world.
It is the British government's attempts to prevent us from grasping these truths which now expose the world to the threat of both nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism. Reprocessing has bequeathed to the United Kingdom the biggest plutonium stockpile in the world: 60 tonnes of our own, and ten tonnes of other people's. The entire stock, as the government's security review board discovered in January, is stored at Sellafield in buildings scarcely more robust than garden sheds. Thirteen kilogrammes of plutonium is enough to make an atom bomb.
Turning this plutonium into Mox is presented as the solution to proliferation. Unhappily, it introduces four further problems. The first is that the Mox process generates still more nuclear waste. The second is that, like every other aspect of the nuclear industry, it costs far more to produce, when all expenses are taken into account, than it can ever recoup. The third is that hardly anyone wants to buy it, as most nuclear power stations use the safer and much cheaper low-enriched uranium. The fourth is that the only certain market is on the other side of the world.