A new plutonium manufacturing plant alongside the existing Mox at Sellafield could create 5,000 jobs and £1 billion of investment, Copeland MP Jamie Reed has told parliament.
The call which the MP first made in The Whitehaven News last February has been repeated in a House of Commons energy debate.
Mr Reed said Copeland and the country could not move forward without a Sellafield Mox Plant (SMP), and action needed to be taken either to safeguard or replace it to help Britain secure its own energy needs and stop reliance on other countries.
The performance of the existing Mox plant is officially “under review” 10 years after being built at a cost of nearly £500 million but the bill has now soared to around £2 billion due to delays in discharging contracts.
But despite SMP’s “significant processing problems”, Mr Reed said 5,000 new jobs could be created and more than £1bn of new investment secured if a new plant was built.
He told fellow MPs of interest from companies prepared to invest in a new facility and, whatever past problems there had been, using plutonium and uranium oxides to create fuel was “unquestionably the right policy”.
Copeland’s MP went on: “SMP hosts a unique array of skilled workers with incredible technical, scientific and engineering competence and these skills and abilities must not be lost to the Sellafield site or to the industry as a whole.
“Closing SMP without a replacement facility is not an option – it has underperformed but has a use until such time as a new Mox plant is built at Sellafield.
“There is no credible case for pursuing an alternative policy on environmental grounds, on economic grounds, on grounds of national energy security and on the grounds of effectively pursuing global non proliferation policies.”
He told climate change minister David Kidney that Britain can only play its part in speeding up nuclear disarmament and securing energy supply with Sellafield, Thorp and SMP or its successor. Plutonium must also be seen as an asset as branding it a “waste” could jeopardise geological repository which in itself would mean investment.
Mr Reed slammed Tory cut proposals for public spending as “entirely ignorant” given that Sellafield is largely funded by the tax-payer. He said any cuts would lead to larger bills in future with decommissioning delayed, on top of any environmental issues.
He added: “Nobody of integrity, knowledge or honesty could possibly hope to sell such a ridiculous proposal to my constituents and the Sellafield workforce.
“If the policy platform of using the Sellafield plutonium stockpile as a valuable commodity in a new facility is followed, the cost of operating Sellafield could be significantly reduced and the clean-up accelerated. ”
Source: Whitehaven News
