(BNFL is a state-owned company with all its shares held by the Department of Trade & Industry. It is supposed to operate as a commercial company and there are at intervals plans to privatise at least some of its operations).

The AGR & PWR stations are owned by British Energy. (A private company)

The Magnox stations are the oldest. Some are now closed and are being decommissioned. The last is to be closed by 2016.

The AGRs have a further life expectancy of between 10 and 25 years

The PWR station has a further life expectancy of 35 years.

(See below for full list of nuclear power stations, including probable decommissioning dates)

All burn uranium in the form of metal-clad rods. The used (spent) fuel rods are intensely radioactive as well as physically hot. All the reactors (apart from at the first two Magnox stations) are continuously refuelled as they are running. Spent rods are removed from the reactor. Those from the Magnox and AGR stations are plunged into on-site cooling ponds for a short period before being transferred to water-filled rail containers (flasks) and sent to Sellafield in Cumbria for reprocessing.

Those from the PWR station are stored in water on-site indefinitely.

Reprocessing is an optional – and expensive - process whereby the rods are cut up and chemically dissolved in order to retrieve a residue of unburnt uranium for possible re-use as well as plutonium which is actually created in act of burning uranium reactor fuel. A substantial amount of intensively radioactive waste also results. This requires long-term storage.

While Magnox spent fuel may now have to be reprocessed (see below), this is not so for AGR and PWR spent fuel which can be placed in long-term storage.

BNFL, who own the two reprocessing plants (B205 and THORP) at Sellafield as well as the Magnox power stations, want reprocessing to continue although they have run into serious economic difficulties and have to import spent fuel from overseas (chiefly Germany and Japan) in order to have any hope of running in particular the huge THORP plant at a profit.

British Energy has no interest in reprocessing and have made it clear that they regard it as economic nonsense. Although they are locked into reprocessing contracts for their AGR spent fuel that pre-date their acquisition of the AGR power stations, they have now (16/3/01) stated that they would not consider reprocessing fuel either from their Sizewell B PWR or from any future new power stations.

Rail transport
The flasks are made of steel, lead-lined and water-filled in order to contain the intense heat and radioactivity of the spent fuel rods. However a limited amount of gamma radiation does escape. In addition the process of loading soaks the outside of the flasks in radioactive water from the cooling ponds. Although they are dried off before despatch, a residue of dried radioactive material remains, clinging to the outside of the flask.

As long as the flasks are on the move and decontamination has been properly carried out, the dangers are slight. However problems arise when the flasks are stopped, for instance in sidings or marshalling points, for any length of time. At these points radioactive pollution from the flasks gradually builds up on the track and in the ballast. Railway employees must not work within 40ft of a flask for more than 30 minutes. Flasks may not be left less than 40 feet from any regularly inhabited building such as a house, school or shop.

Further dangers can result from either high-speed derailment or collision, when the flask might be broached and the contents exposed, or from low-speed derailment while being shunted or marshalled. In such a case, re-railing, track repairs and checking the safety of flask and low-loader could take up to 24 hours, depending on the availability of a breakdown train. Such an incident would add to the build-up of radioactivity on the track and would also pose a danger to rail workers.

On arrival at Sellafield the rods are removed from the flasks for storage – again in water – and eventual reprocessing. The flasks are then decontaminated, using high pressure hoses, dried out and then returned to the power stations for a further load.

Magnox and AGR fuel rods, which differ in design features, are transported in differently designed flasks although the principles and processes remain the same.

The flasks, which when empty weigh approx 40 tonnes, are carried on special low-loading freight wagons. They are not mixed in with any other sort of freight container. The trains are short - mostly one or two flasks. BNFL now has its own wholly-owned rail freight subsidiary company, Direct Rail Services (DRS), which owns its own diesel locomotives and freight wagons. The flasks are also owned by BNFL/DRS.

Imported spent fuel
This is all now shipped into Barrow Docks in flasks, transferred to rail and run up the Cumbrian coast to Sellafield. Flasks are not allowed to use the Channel Tunnel. Previously flasks from continental Europe were transported from Dunkirk to Dover by a now-withdrawn train ferry.

The flasks are owned by the various overseas nuclear power companies and are similar to British flasks although with detail differences. All flasks have to meet international safety standards drawn up by the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA).

Decommissioning
When a nuclear power station is finally closed down and decommissioning begins, all the fuel rods in the reactor are removed and transported to Sellafield. This can take up to five years.

The process is constrained by the limited on-site cooling pond capacity at each power station, to some extent by the availability of flasks, particularly in the case of the Magnox stations where several are likely to be going through the de-fuelling process simultaneously, and possibly by the cooling pond capacity at Sellafield. However a short-term effect of Magnox decommissioning is likely to be an increase in the amount of nuclear spent fuel rail traffic.

Alternatives to reprocessing and the spent fuel traffic (Magnox)
Once Magnox fuel rods have been put into the cooling ponds at the power stations, a process of corrosion of the outer cases begins. Alternative storage methods that have been considered include:

Site-by-site dry storage
The technology of dry storage is well understood. Indeed at one point the two Scottish Magnox power stations actually applied for permission to build on-site dry storage facilities. So this would have been an option in the past for the Magnox stations. However it would take some six years from first application for planning permission through to completed construction. During this time the spent fuel traffic would have to continue.

Given that the stations are now at or near the end of their lives, on-site dry storage is no longer a realisable option.

Centralised dry storage
This has several advantages over site-by-site storage. One large storage site, almost certainly at Sellafield, would be much cheaper and planning permission easier to secure with less local opposition. There is secure space at Sellafield. (This is an important aspect since as the fuel rods become less radioactive, they become more easy to steal and misuse). However the rods would either have to be put into temporary dry storage at the power station – as suggested above, no longer an economic option - before being moved to Sellafield in new dry-transport flasks – a technology that doesn’t yet exist even in theory – or they would have to be moved as at present from cooling pond to water-filled flask.

If this was done promptly it is possible that with corrosion barely started, the rods could be dried out for long term dry storage. This though is a highly speculative suggestion and the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII) have already stated that they would not be prepared to licence dry storage.

Even if centralised dry storage was possible, there would still have to be a regular traffic in spent fuel.

Centralised wet storage
Magnox rods can only be kept in the cooling ponds at Sellafield for a matter of months before they become so badly corroded that they begin to disintegrate. In effect Magnox spent fuel has to be reprocessed. This is hardly surprising since the original Magnox stations were designed primarily with plutonium production, and therefore reprocessing, in mind and electricity generation a secondary consideration.

Alternatives to reprocessing and spent fuel traffic (AGR & PWR)
Because the life expectancy of the AGR and PWR stations is much greater, the economic case against dry storage, either on-site or centralised, no longer applies. In addition neither AGR not PWR fuel rods corrode in water so longer term wet storage is also an option and reprocessing completely unnecessary. In fact the fuel rods from Britain’s one PWR (Sizewell B) are stored on-site in ponds with a fifty year capacity so there are no rail movements involved.

Life expectancy of the B205 reprocessing plant
Near the end of its life, environmentally dirty and prone to break down, B205 is due to be closed by 2012. The THORP plant cannot reprocess Magnox spent fuel without expensive modifications. Given the backlog of spent fuel at Sellafield and the accelerating closure rate of the Magnox stations, this poses considerable problems to BNFL. Trying to prolong the active life of the Magnox stations may postpone the crisis but in the end only makes it more acute.

There is though a partial solution to the problem. It is not necessary to remove the last batch of fuel rods from a reactor that has been shut down for decommissioning. Since they are safely contained in the reactor, they can be left in situ for some years to cool down. In effect this is a form of on-site dry storage.

It must be emphasised that neither the government nor the nuclear power industry has as yet any true long-term nuclear waste storage plans. Yet all nuclear power generation entails uranium mining, refining, transportation, fabrication and enrichment before the fuel is ready for use: all processes that produce radioactive wastes.

After burning in the power station, the spent fuel has to be transported and safely stored while both reprocessing and the eventual decommissioning of the power stations produce more radioactive waste. Most of this waste will have to be stored, monitored and guarded over thousands of years.

Unless these before-and-after expenses are taken into account, any attempt to promote nuclear power by concentrating narrowly on the economics and claimed environmental operational advantages, are fraudulent.

Bearing in mind the entire life cycle from uranium mining to long term nuclear waste treatment and storage, together with the historically close connections between nuclear power and nuclear weapons, CND opposes nuclear-fuelled power generation.

Magnox nuclear power stations with likely closure dates
Hinkley Point A 2000; Bradwell 2002; Dungeness A 2006; Sizewell A 2006; Calder Hall 2006-08; Chapelcross 2008-10; Oldbury 2013; Wylfa 2016-21

Berkeley, Trawsfynedd and Hunterston A are already closed and are in the process of decommissioning. Calder Hall and Chapelcross are operated by BNFL on behalf of the Ministry of Defence. Their primary function has always been to produce plutonium and/or tritium for the British nuclear weapons programme.

AGR nuclear power stations with approximate closure dates
Dungeness B 2009; Hartlepool 2010; Heysham 1 2012; Hinkley Point B 2012; Hunterston B 2012; Heysham 2 2025; Torness 2025

PWR nuclear power station with approximate closure date
Sizewell B 2035

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