 The Sellafield plant, on the UK's Cumbrian Coast |
Desperately seeking plutonium to fill your weaponry needs? Look no further than the west coast of Britain where weapons grade plutonium will be regularly transported from the UK's Sellafield Nuclear Power Plant to France in an unarmed ship.
Weapons-ready plutonium that terrorists could easily make into a nuclear bomb is to be carried hundreds of miles down the west coast of Britain in an unarmed ship....
Experts say that the plutonium dioxide powder, shortly to be taken to France from the Sellafield nuclear complex for the first time, would be an ideal material for creating a nuclear explosion and for use in a dirty bomb. One calls it "the worst possible material" to ship. Yet the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which owns Sellafield, is to take it on an old roll-on roll-off ferry with few security and safety features – even though it has used armed and better-equipped vessels to transport less dangerous nuclear materials in the past. ... Ministers have repeatedly warned that groups such as al-Qa'ida are seeking fissile material so that they can make nuclear bombs.... -- The Independent
The shipments have become necessary because the, er... £470 million Sellafield plant has failed to live up to its touted ability of reprocessing waste fuel (only managing to process around 2% of what they initially promised), and now, with great embarrassment, is having to turn to the French competitor Cogema to process it for them.
It will not give details of the shipments for "security reasons", or even disclose how much weapons-ready material it is having to return owing to "commercial confidentiality". But Core, a Cumbrian campaign group which monitors transport of nuclear material from the complex, said that shipments will start in "the next few days" and will involve hundreds of kilograms of plutonium, enough to make "a large number" of bombs. Core is withholding the exact date of the shipment and The Independent on Sunday has decided not to publish the name of the ship or the route it will take, to avoid any chance of disclosing information that might be of use to terrorists. But an old ro-ro ferry with inferior safety and security features will be used. -- The Independent
John Large, an independent nuclear expert describes the shipments as "cavalier", and Dr. Frank Barnaby, a leading British expert on nuclear terrorism describes it as "madness", and "totally irresponsible".
 Click for full clip Courtesy: Throbgoblins |
But, we've got to keep those costs down, don't we? With energy issues becoming somewhat desperate (how else can you describe a situation where the U.S. and Europe are willing to turn valuable food crops into fuel, putting precious 'set aside' land back into production, destroy boreal forest covering an area the size of Florida and pollute enormous quantities of precious clean water by digging up tar sands in Alberta, turn dirty coal - with twice the global warming potential - into liquid fuel, etc.?) the nuclear agenda is one I expect we'll be dealing with increasingly over the next couple of decades -- unless we 1) seriously reduce our energy demands, and 2) get serious about the need to move away from energy sources that are unsustainable, fraught with the potential for mishaps today and which are a morally repugnant 'gift' to future generations.
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