The 11
March earthquake and tsunami that crippled Japan's nuclear industry has claimed
a commercial victim thousands of miles away: the Sellafield Mixed Oxide (MOX)
plant in Cumbria, UK, is to close "at the earliest practical
opportunity" the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority announced today.
The plant's
only customer was the vastly-troubled Japanese nuclear industry, currently
embroiled in a programme of plant shutdowns as the scale of the seismic menace
some of its power stations face comes into sharper relief. A Sellafield
spokesman said plans to close one plant in particular, at Hamaoka, was
instrumental in sealing the MOX plant's fate.
Situated on
the coast some 200 kilometres south of Tokyo, the Hamaoka nuclear power plant
straddles two major geological faults and has been described by seismologist
Katsuhiko Ishibashi at Kobe University as a "kamikaze terrorist waiting to explode".
In May, wary
of the risk of a magnitude 8 quake in the next 30 years, the government ordered
it to close for an indeterminate period while a massive sea wall is built. The
NDA said it is unwilling to burden the UK taxpayer with the costs of running
the MOX plant when it has no foreseeable chance of making any nuclear fuel
sales any time soon.
However,
the MOX plant is small part of the Sellafield site - the sprawling complex
employs some 10,000 people in the Magnox and Thermal Oxide reprocessing plants.
They perform a raft of decommissioning operations, including the handling and
storage of various grades of nuclear waste - some of it awaiting a future deep geological disposal site.
Sellafield's
operators and the NDA hope some of the 600 staff at the MOX plant can be
redeployed in future decommissioning operations.
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