Jacob demands UK honour pledge on new Sellafield plant

The Government has written to two British ministers demanding that they honour commitments made earlier this year and block the operation of a new nuclear plant on the Sellafield complex.

The Minister of State for Public Enterprise, Mr Joe Jacob, wrote to two ministers on Friday, immediately after a UK Environment Agency decision to authorise the use of the new MOX plant at Sellafield. The UKEA also agreed changes in the limits for Sellafield discharges, allowing higher gaseous but lower liquid discharges.

The £300 million plant, which was built before permission to use it was given by the UKEA or British government, will manufacture a new nuclear power plant fuel which includes uranium and plutonium.

The EA, however, put the final decision on the plant's operation into the hands of the Secretary of State for the Environment, Mr John Prescott, and the Secretary of State for Agriculture, Forestry and Food, Dr Jack Cunningham. This was done, the EA said, "to enable them to consider whether they wish to direct the agency to make different decisions or to issue further policy guidance to the agency".

The Government and Mr Jacob are attempting to exert political influence to block the full commissioning of the MOX plant. "These decisions are totally unacceptable to the Irish Government," Mr Jacob said yesterday.

In particular, he said, he would target the Environment Minister, Mr Michael Meacher, with whom he had had discussions during the OSPAR meeting last summer in Portugal. "At our Ospar meeting, in full committee, Michael Meacher said he would address the issue of discharges," and had given assurances about Sellafield. "We got that positive response from him at Ospar."

He said he wrote to Mr Meacher and to Dr Cunningham after the EA decisions on Friday. Mr Jacob said the discharge levels in particular were in breach of the undertakings entered into in Portugal which committed Sellafield to near-zero discharges by 2020.

The EA's decisions were a total deviation from the commitments indicated at ministerial level, Mr Jacob added.

The Green Party spokeswoman on nuclear affairs, Ms Nuala Ahern MEP, was critical of the Government's response to the Sellafield decisions. "Irish Government inaction on Sellafield has been scandalous," she said in a statement. She also said the new EA discharge licence was "illegal under the Ospar agreements on pollution of the sea agreed in July in Lisbon".

"I don't think the Government has been tough enough on this," she told The Irish Times. "If they pushed a little bit harder the whole thing would unravel."

The Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland, greatly regrets the EA decisions, according to its chief executive, Dr Tom O'Flaherty. "This plant would add yet another dimension to the wide variety of nuclear installations on the Sellafield site, all of which are objectionable from an Irish point of view."

He said it was noteworthy that in its advice the EA drew attention to weaknesses in its own terms of reference in addressing the matter. "For instance, it had no remit to consider the wider issues of plutonium management strategy which are raised by a plant which uses plutonium as one of its main raw materials."

He said it was also absurd that the EA had no powers to require an application to be submitted for a new plant before its construction. "The agency received the application for the MOX plant after the plant was built" and so was unable to consider the full economic case of such a plant in the first place.

"In view of these self-confessed limitations of the Environment Agency advice, it is still to be hoped that the UK government will find it possible to reject the advice it has received to allow operation of this plant to go ahead."

Sellafield's operator, British Nuclear Fuels Ltd, said in a statement that the EA decision on the MOX plant was "pleasing" and that the EA had recognised the compelling case for the plant.

MOX stands for mixed oxide and describes a new type of power-plant fuel which blends oxides of uranium and plutonium. The current generation of fuels only uses uranium, but inclusion of plutonium would allow stockpiles of this highly-dangerous substance to be recycled with uranium back into the nuclear fuel cycle.