Anti-nuclear
Comments: 1
I wish things like this didn’t happen.
Japanese Shipment of Nuclear Fuel Raises Security Fears
By Howard, nytimes.comTAKAHAMA, Japan, July 4 — Chugging past protesters shouting through megaphones, a slow-moving ship set out today from this tiny port town in western Japan carrying more than 550 pounds of nearly weapons-grade plutonium, the first shipment of its kind anywhere in the world since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States. […]
Today’s shipment is the result of a major blunder, followed by an attempted cover-up, at BNFL, a troubled state-owned British nuclear fuels reprocessing company. In 1999, using a similar maritime security detail, BNFL shipped a cargo of fuel of mixed uranium and plutonium oxide, known as Mox, to Japan for use in a Kansai Electric reactor here.
The fuel, which is encased in ceramic pellets, must be milled to meet highly exacting standards. But after delivery here, it was discovered that many of the required quality controls had been fraudulently certified. Japan depends almost entirely on BNFL, as well as one other French contractor, to reprocess its nuclear reactor wastes, from which plutonium is derived.
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Posted to General Rants • 2002.07.05 (Fri) • 10:31
Comments
Posted by Christopher Walker 2002.07.05, 20:00
I can’t say I’m at all surprised. BNFL is the epitome of British incompetence, and it worries me that Japan could be duped into doing business with them. It’s bad enough that Britain sheltered most of the Sept. 11 hijackers at one time or another. And people ask me why I’m not patriotic.
Fraudulent certification for nuclear components: wasn’t that the central part of a film plot once? With Jack Lemmon and Michael Douglas and Jane Fonda? Should have been called “The Japan Syndrome”.
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