Sitting on a plutonium mountain

“Britain’s nuclear timebomb,” headlines the Independent, revealing that the world’s largest “mountain of plutonium waste” is stored in Sellafield, in the north-west of England. Some 132 tonnes of radioactive plutonium are currently awaiting conversion into Mox, a reprocessed nuclear fuel destined for the Japanese market. However, the recent nuclear crisis at the Fukushima power plant in Japan has led to a freeze in international trade of Mox, with Japanese companies saying they “will not now be taking any reprocessed fuel from Britain until at least the end of the decade.” The London daily adds that the existing Sellafield Mox Plant, opened in 2002, – “has produced just 13.8 tons of Mox fuel in nine years compared to an expected output of 120 tons per year. A leaked cable from the US embassy in London said Sellafield's Mox plant was a white elephant costing about £90m (€101m) a year and considered, privately, by the UK Government as ‘[one of] the most embarrassing failures in British industrial history’."