Stop Windscale's million-year aton

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If current plans to proceed to expand facilities for the reprocessing of nuclear waste at the Windscale plant are not stopped, permanent and serious damage will certainly be done to the environment which will affect the lives and the health of generations to come.

Yet the Lib-Lab coalition government-subservient in this as in everything to the requirements of international capital, is clearly determined to press ahead regardless of the dangers.

And the same TUC leaders who have refused to defend the jobs of their members wherever they have come under attack are now arguing that they cannot obstruct the possible new jobs that might be created from the new venture.

Great efforts have been made to cover up the legitimate worries of many workers and scientists about the safety of the processes used in the latest plans for developing nuclear energy with a new series of Fast Breeder reactors.

Spectacular destruction The new technology, alongside its huge potential benefits properly developed, also has the potential to cause spectacular destruction.

Nuclear reactor programmes remain beseiged with safety problems. The unsolved problem of the ultimate disposal of nuclear wastes has attracted particluar attention.

In fact, at virtually all points during the nuclear fuel cycle (from the mining, through processing and transportation, right up to utilisation and storage of nuclear materials) there are opportunities for people to be exposed to significant radioactivity or for other hazards to arise.

More plutonium A fast reactor, so called because of the speed of the neutrons involved in its fission reactions, is smaller, hotter and contains more plutonium than a conventional thermai reactor.

By careful design of a fast reactor's fuel elements and by surronding them with suitable uranium oxide elements it is possible to create more plutonium than is consumed. Hence the term fast breeder reactor (FBR).

Special safety hazards in the fast reactor can arise from sudden surges of extra power as the reactor core (where fission reactions occur) new takes positions in use.

If the rate of temperature rise is very rapid, the core could melt and the molten fuel and the liquid sodium used as a coolant interact explosively.

Reprocessing of fast reactor fuel elements involves dissolving the fuel from its cladding and separating out the plutonium, uranium and intensely radioactive fission products.

In the appropriate concentrations plutonium, like other fissile materials, can produce a spontaneous, uncontrolled, fission chain reaction; this is the property made use of in atomic bombs.

Ten accidents involving uncontrolled chain reactions are known to have occurred resulting in several workers being injured and some deaths.

Plutonium is perhaps the most toxic element known and has no antidote. Amounts as low as one millionth of a gramme can be hazardous in lungs and bone.

"Half life"

Its toxicity results from its radioactivity and the fact that once it gains access to the body it is retained for long periods.

It also has a long "half-life" (i.e. the time taken for half the atoms to lose their activityl-of some 24,400 years!

The movement of three tons of plutonium every year from British reactors to reprocessing sites has been suggested as likely should FBR's be established in Britain.

This represents 500,000000,000 times the maximum permissible body burden laid down by statute in this country. A phenomenal amount of poison!

If the handling of plutonium increases as FBR's and reprocessing plants like Windscale, are established, the chances must be that the number of accidents will also increase.

Little known

The high activity wastes of nuclear reactor programmes present the most enduring safety problems. The wastes are of two types: fission products and a group of elements, which includes plutonium and uranium, known as actinides.

At present, fission products are stored as acid solutions in cooled, stainless steel tanks.

This temporary storage is necessary little is known ab safely dispose of these wastes that no acceptable method is yet available.

Provided that they can be separated from actinides with a high degree of efficiency then converted to glass and stored in a stable geological formation, they would decay to manageable activities only after about 800 years.

Anyway, development of the process for converting liquid wastes to glass has so far only reached the pilot plant scale.

The actinides themselves and the products of their spontaneous decay, however, remain a hazard for millions of years. There is no convincing method available for their storage or conversion to manageable substances.

Four methods for the disposal of actinides are being studied at present.

These are: burial in deep and jagy bodies VELL - BAXTO THE OLD DRAWING BOARD! stable geological formation; burial under the floor of the deep ocean; emplacement in suitably longlived containers on the bed of the deep ocean; and irradiation in a suitable reactor to convert them to shorter lived materials.

Highly dangerous

The first method begs the question: What geological formation can be considered stable over geologically significant period of time? And the second and third methods run up against the long life of the actinides.

The fourth method is acknowledged by the Health and Safety Executive as having daunting technoligical difficulties, but is the most satisfactory of the ones mentioned.

Even this however, would yield materials that at best would remain highly dangerous for 500300 years.

The disposal of low and moderate activity wastes also presents a hazard to life. At present, solid wastes contaminated with small amounts of plutonium and other activities are dumped on the sea bed in containers that are designed to leak and are never expected to retain their contents for more than ten years.

Control

Low activity liquid wastes from reprocessing and fuel fabrication at Windscale and Dounreay are discharghed to the sea through pipelines.

Dilution has not always been achieved. Radiation levels in the Celtic Sea have caused a great deal of concern. One type had risen to 83% of permitted levels by 1975, and there has been a tenfold rise in the levels of radioactive casium in fish between 1973 and 1975.

While it is clear that alt manner of reactionary "back to the land" petty bourgeois 'ecology" groups attempt to use fears of the hazards we have listed to oppose all nuclear technology, only a fool would turn his back YOUR POWER COMPANY REGRETS THE RECENT NUCLEAR MELT DOWN AND WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT on the problem. The fight be taken up for control ove new source of energy and its *No further work reprocessing FBR's and reactors until safety precal are acceptable to committees whose members be drawn from all industr assess safety aspects of n power generators.

*No further work on n reactors until a safe and eff means of disposal of ex and potential wastes is w out.

*No redundancies in nuclear industries-work si on full pay for those who c be transferred to research pending these developments *For an increase in spending on all aspects of re: into the exploitation of n power, under the contri elected workers committees.

*For full publication of ‹ on known existing hazard immediate compensation victims of past unpl 'experiments' Lone TUC opponent Windscale gamble, m: leader Arthur Scargi! THAT NOBODY'S PERFICT..

YeLR PoWER COMPANY