UK nuclear waste completes trip from Japan
Date: 19-Sep-02
Country: UK
Author: Ian Hodgson
The waste - which has provoked confrontation at sea and on land with anti-nuclear protesters - was lifted cask by cask from a freighter and placed on a train which took the short journey to the Sellafield plant.
The potentially weapons-capable plutonium mixed oxide, known as MOX, was taken to Japan in 1999 but was rejected by its Japanese client after the company which shipped it - British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) - admitted falsifying safety documents.
BNFL said the waste was returned to Sellafield safely, but was careful not to paint the sensitive operation as a success.
"We don't see this as a victory," BNFL chief executive officer Norman Askey told Sky Television News after the MOX was unloaded. "We don't see this as success. There was a disastrous mistake three years ago."
Askew, who only took over at the helm of the British nuclear institution two and a half years ago, said quality control systems were now fully in place.
"We have changed our systems. We are not where we were. We made a mistake three years ago and we must never forget that," he said.
The Pacific Pintail freighter, followed by its armed escort the Pacific Teal, was escorted into harbour by nine police boats, a police helicopter and a protest flotilla.
More than 100 police were on standby.
"There were even policemen on the uninhabited Irish Sea islands in full uniform," protester Mike Clark of the Nuclear Free Seas Flotilla told Reuters from his yacht White Heather in Barrow harbour.
One man was arrested for breach of the peace.
FIRST SINCE SEPTEMBER 11
The nuclear waste's marathon journey from Japan was the first shipment of its kind since last year's September 11 attacks on the United States and caused embarrassment to BNFL.
"This plutonium MOX should never have been shipped to Japan in the first place in 1999," Shaun Burnie of environmental protest group Greenpeace said in a statement.
"If they (BNFL) had their way it would now be loaded into a nuclear reactor increasing the risks of a catastrophic nuclear accident," he added.
Dozens of countries along the shipment's route had voiced environmental and security concerns - many feared the cargo could prove an attractive target for terrorists.
The transport also aggravated tensions between London and Dublin over the Sellafield nuclear plant, which is just 110 miles (180 km) from the Irish coast.
"It's absolute madness that our oceans should be used for the transportation of this material and it's intolerable that the Irish Sea should be used as a nuclear highway," Jim Corr of Irish pop group The Corrs told Sky. (Additional reporting by Georgina Prodhan).
