BNFL turns to French rival to save MOX plant

Green lobby vindicated as nuclear fuel group admits reprocessing may be redundant, write Jason Nissé and Geoffrey Lean

BNFL has had to turn to its biggest competitor, the French group Cogema, for help to try to get its controversial £500m MOX plant operating properly.

The plant, which reprocesses spent nuclear fuel into mixed oxide pellets that can be used in reactors, is years behind target and has lost the company hundreds of millions of pounds.

In contrast, Cogema, which is part of the French nuclear utility Areva, has built two successful MOX plants: Caderache, which is now in the process of being decommissioned; and Melox, which is running at close to full capacity.

The failure of BNFL's MOX plant has led it to turn to Cogema first to reprocess fuel sent to BNFL by clients and now to help it get its plant working properly.

At the company's Stakeholder Dialogue - a meeting with customers, civil servants and interested parties, held last week - BNFL director David Bonser admitted that the group had asked outside consultants to help it with problems at the MOX plant. "It pains me to tell you this, but one of these is Cogema," he said.

The irony will not be lost on anti-nuclear protesters, who were frustrated by BNFL's failure to provide details of its financial justification for the MOX plant when it was being proposed and built in the 1990s.

Three years ago, consultancy Arthur D Little was asked by the Government to report on whether the MOX plant should be abandoned. BNFL was so concerned about secrecy that the consultants were forced to study documentation on BNFL's own premises.

BNFL said it did not want to release commercially sensitive information that might aid rivals. However, the only real rival in the MOX business is Cogema.

A BNFL spokesman confirmed Cogema had been working with it. "We have used them for discrete technical work and they are subject to confidentiality agreements," the spokesman said.

But BNFL and Cogema will still complete for MOX contracts. Cogema was chosen by the United States for the so-called "MOX for peace" programme, under which 140kg of weapons grade plutonium was controversially transported by sea and road to the Caderache plant for reprocessing. It arrived just over a week ago. The next round of contracts may come from Japan, which is set to step up its nuclear power programme.

BNFL has also revealed that it is has found a safe way to store spent fuel from Britain's ageing Magnox power stations, thus undermining the last rationale for reprocessing.

For decades the company has insisted that, once Magnox fuel had been placed in storage ponds and become wet, it had to be reprocessed because its cladding would corrode. It would therefore have been most unsafe to remove it and to store it on land. But last week the company admitted that it had found a way to store spent fuel on dry land.

In a report, BNFL said: "Full-scale durability trials of the resultant encapsulating package have been encouraging." The report added that it had also "examined the potential" of storing spent fuel instead of putting it in the ponds in the first place, and found no major obstacles to doing so. Environmentalists have been arguing for this since before the 1970s Windscale inquiry, but have always been rebuffed by BNFL

BNFL says it still prefers to reprocess the fuel, but that it is looking for an "alternative contingency option" if it has not managed to deal with all the used fuel from the Magnox reactors before the plant reprocessing it closes in 2012.

But nuclear critics claim that the reports should mark the final nail in the coffin of the controversial reprocessing package, since all the other arguments for it have crumbled.

The original rationale was that plutonium and uranium would become scarce as nuclear power expanded, and that reprocessing was needed so they could be extracted from spent fuel and made into new MOX fuel.

But the expansion of nuclear energy never happened, the price of uranium plummeted, and the world became awash with plutonium from reprocessing and the destruction of weapons stockpiles. And now BNFL cannot even get the MOX fabrication plant to work fully.