The UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority remains in talks with GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy to build its Prism fast reactors at Sellafield as a means of managing and disposing of the UK’s 84-tonne stockpile of civil plutonium, an NDA spokesman said January 24.
NDA spokesman Bill Hamilton described reports in today’s Guardian newspaper that the NDA had rejected GE-Hitachi’s proposals as “completely without foundation.”
“Discussions are ongoing,” Hamilton told i-NUCLEAR.
He said the NDA was prepared to provide financial support to develop the proposals if ongoing discussions demonstrate promise.
The GE-Hitachi proposals involve burning the UK’s plutonium stockpiles in the Power Reactor Innovative Small Module (Prism) fast reactors.
The burned plutonium fuel would reach IAEA spent fuel standards of radioactivity in as little as a few months, according to GEH, and could then be stored for recycling or burial.
The Prism reactors could also be used to generate electricity, and therefore income, for the NDA, under the proposal.
“The information used in this (Guardian) story is out of date and misleading to readers,” a GEH spokesman said January 24 in an emailed statement to i-NUCLEAR. He said Prism was only launched on the 30th November last year and that until that time “only very limited formal information was provided by GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy to any external parties, including the NDA, on the technology and its benefits,” the spokesman said.
GEH’s proposal represents an alternative to the government’s preferred option announced in December of using the plutonium in mixed-oxide, or MOX, fuel to be used in commercially available light water reactors.
The Prism reactor remains a prototype, although the US NRC has issued a preliminary safety evaluation report on the design.
Hamilton said the NDA has not rejected nor ruled out the GEH proposal. If the proposal would turn out to be potentially advantageous to the NDA, it would consider contributing money to advance the proposals, Hamilton said.
“At the moment there has been no contractualisation,” he said.
The Guardian newspaper report was based on internal NDA emails released under a Freedom of Information Act request from Cumbria-based nuclear critic Jean McSorley.
“In the time that has passed since the emails the author references in his story, dialogue between GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy and the NDA has developed, and continues to develop, as we are able to share and explain more about PRISM,” GEH said in its statement.
“We are working to demonstrate the advantages of the proposal to the NDA and show why PRISM makes the plutonium more proliferation-resistant than other options and can be readily deployed as soon as the licensing process allows,” the spokesman said.
In one of the emails released under the Freedom of Information Act request, dated November 29, 2011, NDA Strategy Director Adrian Simper presents an apparently critical assessment of the Prism proposal and lays out a series of fairly serious hurdles, which GEH would have to meet in order to proceed.
In his email, Simper said the NDA “was not prepared to take technology risk on a new reactor and build its own – we wanted to use market provided reactors.”
Simper said the NDA had not included the Prism reactor in its early option studies because it had not believed it was a “credible” option.
Simper said in the email that although GE Hitachi carried out an extensive engagement process with government and other stakeholders, “we have struggled to reach a clear agreement on the work necessary to demonstrate credibility, without which neither NDA nor government can consider PRISM further in the development of our strategy.”
However, Simper said in the email that NDA agreed to continue engaging with GEH and “set a hurdle for credibility” as follows:
1) He said GEH would have to provide a disposability assessment for the spent fuel from the Prism reactor similar to the disposability assessment NDA has for spent MOX fuel, through the usual Radioactive Waste Management Directorate (RWMD) processes. RWMD is responsible for the government’s planned geological disposal facility.
2) GEH would have to demonstrate licenceability “in some proper way, for example an assessment by a credible consulting engineer setting reactor aspects against UK Safety Assessment Principles and demonstrating licenceability in principle.
3) GEH would have to demonstrate that they had a tie-in with “a credible utility/reactor operator i.e. a utility already established in the UK market and operating a nuclear plant somewhere in the world (like RWE, ION Iberdrolla etc.) [sic] who was prepared to own and operate a PRISM reactor.”
4) GEH would have to demonstrate that the total cost of the implementation “would be around £2.5Bn discounted and no more than a few hundred million pounds in any one year – i.e. about the same shape as the other options,” Simper said.
5) GEH would have to commit to a commercial structure that insulated government for technology deployment risk.
“We set you the challenge to demonstrate credibility and we were prepared to go further and consider contractualisation of the position so that on a successful demonstration of credibility, as measured against the above hurdles, NDA would provide a contribution to the costs of preparing the credibility demonstration report,” Simper wrote.
–David Stellfox