The British ships about to pick up a consignment of plutonium present one of the gravest of all threats to global
security.
Dirty Bombs Waiting for a Detonator
By George Monbiot*
Published in the Guardian 11th June 2002
The world now faces two imminent nuclear threats. The first is the standoff between India and Pakistan, two nuclear
powers vacillating on the brink of war. The second arises from a commercial deal between the United Kingdom and Japan.
At the end of this week, two British ships will pull into the port of Takahama, to collect enough plutonium to make 17
atomic bombs. While the transport of nuclear material within Japan has been halted during the World Cup, as there are
not enough police to guarantee its safety, the power behind this shipment permits no such considerations. The plutonium
will be transported 18,000 miles through some of the roughest and most dangerous seas on earth back to Britain, where it
will be repacked and returned to Japan. Its security has been described by the definitive defence briefing Jane's
Foreign Report as "totally inadequate". Britain and Japan are to launch, in the form of the two freighters carrying the
material, a pair of floating dirty bombs, waiting for a detonator. And they are doing so for reasons which have nothing
to do with economics and nothing to do with defence, but everything to do with a politics which is as mad and dangerous
as their mission.
The cargo they will collect is a consignment of mixed plutonium and uranium oxides -- Mox for short -- which was
delivered by British Nuclear Fuels Ltd to Japan, where it was to have been used as reactor fuel. The Japanese discovered
that BNFL had falsified its records, and demanded that the company retrieve it.
BNFL, which is a state-owned company, must comply if it is not to lose future markets for its Mox fuel. It must defend
those markets in order to justify the government's decision in October to allow the Mox plant at Sellafield in Cumbria
to open. The Mox plant opened in order to make sense of the reprocessing operations at Sellafield, which extract
plutonium and uranium from nuclear waste. The reprocessing was permitted in order to provide a reason for Sellafield's
continued existence. Sellafield exists in order to keep the British nuclear power programme running. The British nuclear
power programme exists because ... well, it exists because it exists. There may once have been a reason, but if so it
has been lost in the mists of time.
Britain's nuclear policy, in other words, is like the old woman who swallowed a fly. Every solution is worse than the
problem it was supposed to address. Every new justification ratchets up the probability of a major nuclear accident or
breach of security. Yet the programme's institutional momentum carries all before it.
This programme can sustain itself only until the public grasps the two unavoidable facts of nuclear power. The first is
that there is, as yet, no safe means of disposing of the wastes it produces. The second is that even if one is found,
the monitoring and safe management of these wastes requires 250,000 years of political and economic stability. No
government on earth can guarantee five.
It is the British government's attempts to prevent us from grasping these truths which now expose the world to the
threat of both nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism. Reprocessing has bequeathed to the United Kingdom the
biggest plutonium stockpile in the world: 60 tonnes of our own, and ten tonnes of other people's. The entire stock, as
the government's security review board discovered in January, is stored at Sellafield in buildings scarcely more robust
than garden sheds. Thirteen kilogrammes of plutonium is enough to make an atom bomb.
Turning this plutonium into Mox is presented as the solution to proliferation. Unhappily, it introduces four further
problems. The first is that the Mox process generates still more nuclear waste. The second is that, like every other
aspect of the nuclear industry, it costs far more to produce, when all expenses are taken into account, than it can ever
recoup. The third is that hardly anyone wants to buy it, as most nuclear power stations use the safer and much cheaper
low-enriched uranium. The fourth is that the only certain market is on the other side of the world.
Japan has its own warped institutional reasons for engaging in this trade. Its fast breeder programme, which was to have
used the plutonium extracted from the waste it sent to Sellafield for reprocessing, collapsed after an accident in 1995.
But it remains contractually bound to BNFL to re-import its plutonium. So it has asked the company to turn it into Mox,
which it can use (at considerable hazard) in its light water reactors.
The dirty bombs BNFL is about to launch onto the high seas will be, it hopes, among the first of many. To avoid creating
the impression that this freight might possibly be dangerous, Japan has insisted that the ships have no military escort.
They have weapons on board, but neither the radar-guided anti-missile defences nor the speed required to evade an attack
from a fast boat.
To spread plutonium across an entire region, terrorists need only send a missile or boat like the one Bin Laden used to
attack the USS Cole, equipped with the right explosives, into the side of one of the freighters. The Mox fuel is stored
in containers which can resist temperatures of 800C for 30 minutes. Fires on ships, as the Ecologist magazine has
pointed out, can burn for 24 hours at 1000C.
Stealing the material is a matter of overwhelming the 26 British policemen on board and blowing the hatches off, a task
well within the capabilities of several terrorist groups and all of the world's aspirant nuclear states. The plutonium
and uranium can be separated with chemical processes less taxing than the manufacture of designer drugs.
So the United Kingdom and Japan are investing billions in security, and billions in insecurity. Neither government dares
challenge the nuclear monster it has created. Using taxpayers' money to charm, cajole and threaten both the government
and the taxpayer, this self-serving, self-reproducing industry, which makes nothing which could not be made more cheaply
elsewhere, has secured such resources, such concessions, such flat contradictions of policy that we have ended up
sponsoring the major threat to our own security.
When power resides with private companies, the British government will nest with them and raise their young. When it
resides with a state-owned monster which would not have looked out of place in Brezhnev's Russia, the same government
will happily mate with that monster. One moment it will warn of such threats to our security that the police must have
access to our email accounts, protesters must be classified as terrorists and Afghanistan must be bombed; the next it
will dismiss such concerns as nonsense in order to ship plutonium round the world in civilian freighters.
The nuclear industry must be destroyed before it destroys us. We must, in other words, wrench political power away from
nuclear power.
* - Who I Am - George Monbiot was born in 1963. He's the author of Captive State: the corporate takeover of Britain, and the
investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and No Man's Land. He writes a weekly column for the
Guardian newspaper. He is Honorary Professor at the Department of Politics in Keele and Visiting Professor at the
Department of Environmental Science at the University of East London and formerly Visiting Fellow at Green College
Oxford and Visiting Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Bristol. This column is republished with the author’s
permission.See http://www.monbiot.com/