Greenpeace insisted yesterday that it would be business as usual at the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in Cumbria. This is despite the announcement by the operator, British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), of the phased closure of the eight Magnox nuclear power stations at the plant. The timetable for the closures, beginning this year with the Hinkley Point A station and ending around 2010, has been made in light of the operating lifetime of the stations, which is between 33 and 50 years. It does not mean, however, that nuclear reprocessing will end at Sellafield and in the case of two Magnox stations, Oldbury and Wylfa, BNFL is seeking to extend their lifetimes by five and up to 17 years, respectively, by using another form of nuclear fuel.
In Dublin, the Minister of State responsible for nuclear safety, Mr Joe Jacob, described BNFL's announcement as "too little, too late".
He said BNFL had lost a lot of public-relations ground when the UK Nuclear Installations Inspectorate indicted safety at the Sellafield plant in February. He believed the phased closures announcement was an effort to "pull back this ground".
Mr Jacob said he had been given numerous assurances on the safety of the plants, but was not convinced. The repeated incidents involving the reactors only reinforced his concern, the Government's concern and the Irish people's concern.
"We are calling for the ending of reprocessing at Sellafield, and that time-scale is just not good enough. Our policy remains unchanged. We want it shut down now."
Criticising the plan, Greenpeace said nuclear reprocessing would continue at Sellafield and there would be no reduction in nuclear discharges despite the opposition of the Irish, Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic governments.
"Nuclear fuel will be reprocessed at Sellafield and it is business as usual from BNFL," a Greenpeace spokeswoman told The Irish Times. "This is flying in the face of that international opposition," she added.
The Workers' Party, in a statement, also said the move was "too little, too late". The party's spokesman, Mr Peter Short, said the Magnox stations were already obsolete and a 21-year closure plan was another generation away and far too slow.
Most of the Magnox nuclear power stations began generating electricity up to 50 years ago and their operating lifetimes have been extended at various points. However, when BNFL officials appeared before a Trade and Industry Select Committee in the Commons earlier this year the company gave a commitment to produce a timetable for the closure of the eight power stations leading to the eventual closure of the Magnox reprocessing plant.
Announcing the closure plan, BNFL's chief executive, Mr Norman Askew, said he wanted to provide "certainty" about the future and bring "clarity" to the company's business plans while working with employees and local communities to explain the process of decommissioning the stations. Market conditions and technical issues could result in earlier closures, but Mr Askew admitted that while the final closure date of the entire Magnox plant was planned for 2012, "this could be later, depending on throughput schedules achieved based on the same programme".
The process of "defuelling", or removing nuclear fuel from the stations, could take between three and four years after which the fuel would be reprocessed at the main Sellafield plant and the Magnox stations decommissioned, or cleaned up.
Each of the eight Magnox station employs up to 350 people and BNFL expects job numbers to remain "fairly constant" up to a year after the stations are closed. After the defuelling process job numbers at each station will fall to around 50.