Nuclear industry: Crumbling stores, leaky plants and the dangers of old age

Terry Macalister
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 October 2009 19.48 BST
Dealing with the problems of old age lies at the heart of the nuclear industry's challenge to convince the public of its safety: leaky power plants, crumbling waste stores nearing the end of their lives and overworked inspectors who do not have the time to assess properly the next generation of power stations.
Even with billions of pounds a year being poured into clean-up operations, it is a toxic legacy going back to the cold war that continually threatens to undermine the facelift given by the new private sector companies. The companies, mainly from France and Germany, have joined the government to try to convince the public it is time for a nuclear renaissance, on both energy security and climate change grounds. In recent days the industry watchdog, the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII), has admitted that the possibility of a serious accident at Britain's biggest nuclear complex, Sellafield in Cumbria, is still "far too high", while questioning the safety designs of new reactors being submitted for approval.
The private sector managers who took over at Sellafield less than a year ago have been told in a letter that they should reduce the risks at the radioactive storage pond dubbed "Dirty 30" and elsewhere as soon as possible.
The harsh assessment by the NII was revealed by one of its inspectors, Mark Foy, at a meeting of local stakeholders who live around the area of the plant. "We are concerned that the risk of a major event caused by further degradation of legacy plants, or increased time at risk due to deferrals, is far too high," said Foy. "We have written to Sellafield Ltd to advise that every effort should be given to addressing and reducing the risks at the earliest possibility."
The warning comes months after the Observer revealed an internal NII report that detailed 1,767 leaks, breakdowns and other mishaps around the atomic industry over the last seven years. While most were small in nature they are nonetheless worrying and undermine the cheerful message from the Nuclear Industry Association that safety of UK plants is "second to none".
Sellafield itself was fined £2m in 2006 after 80,000 tonnes of acid contaminated with 20 tonnes of uranium and 160kg of plutonium escaped from a broken pipe into what it calls "secondary containment". The fine was relatively heavy because the leak was going on for eight months before it was detected.
Sellafield is now being run by Nuclear Management Partners, a consortium of Areva of France, URL Washington Group of the US and Amex of Britain. They have let it be known privately that they expect to make some £10m each this year as bonus payments under the contract they hold for clearing up the site and reducing costs. They said safety took "the highest priority" at Sellafield, but they admit that decommissioning is a slow process and any delays could leave the risk there "unacceptable".
The admonishment from the NII is a particular embarrassment for Areva, which has run into trouble with the same organisation over the approval of its European Pressurised Reactor design. The largely state-owned French power company EDF wants to build four new EPRs in Britain, but the NII, part of the Health and Safety Executive, is questioning the design's safety.
"We have serious concern about your proposal, which allows lower safety class systems or manual controls to [override] higher safety class systems," it says in a letter, suggesting the operating and safety mechanisms should be able to operate independently. Finnish regulators have also questioned this aspect of an EPR being built at Olkiluoto.
The NII is questioning both Areva and a rival company, Westinghouse, about how their designs would stand up to a 9/11-style attack from the air.
Nuclear industry executives recognise the importance of public confidence over safety and security but remain aware of the long shadows cast by the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents in the 1980s and 1990s, which destroyed public confidence.
In the UK, Sellafield, then-called Windscale, suffered a significant fire in 1957, but the many hundreds of minor accidents since have kept concern high.
The Environment Agency this year won a prosecution of Magnox Electric Ltd for allowing a radioactive leak to continue for 14 years without being detected at the Bradwell plant in Essex. Mike Weightman, the head of the NII, said at the time it was simply not possible to "inspect or check every feature of a complex plant".
However, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that the "HSE has struggled to recruit sufficient nuclear safety inspectors." There are currently 166 staff but the requirement for regulating existing facilities is 192. "This would leave the NII with one of the lowest ratios of inspectors to plant in the world," Weightman admitted in a report. Furthermore, to assess new reactor designs, Weightman says he needs a further 36 inspectors, to bring the complement up to 228 by 2011.
Another issue is that a quarter of all British nuclear inspectors will be over 60 within the next "two to three years", said the NII. But it is not just the personnel that are growing old.
"Ageing issues apply across all areas of existing nuclear plant," said the report, Briefing on the Nuclear Programme, which was drafted in January but later amended. In particular, "Sellafield continues to provide significant challenge, especially in the operational fragility of some of its radioactive waste treatment plant and the lack of progress in decommissioning the highly hazardous redundant plant".
The document also shows the number of "safety events" across the years. The total is 1,767 but 1,292 are on the lowest scale of risk under the International Nuclear Event Scale, a safety classification developed post-Chernobyl. Five of them come under the second-highest ranking and almost half – 858 – were judged to have been serious enough "to have had the potential to challenge a nuclear safety system".
A DECC spokesman said: "The UK's nuclear safety regime is acknowledged to be one of the most stringent in the world, and the UK nuclear industry has a strong safety record. The same rigour will apply to a new generation of nuclear power. There is no room for complacency and the fact that all incidents, however minor, are reported to the authorities and the public is a sign of a rigorous, transparent safety regime."
Additional reporting by Rob Edwards