Tuesday evening’s fire on a ship carrying radioactive waste across the Moray Firth appears to have been put out without causing serious harm, and the ship towed to safety, but how risky are the current shipping activities around our coasts, in the course of decommissioning Dounreay?
The Danish ro-ro freight carrier, Parida, was carrying two flasks [heavily strengthened containers] each holding three 500 litre drums of cemented intermediate level radioactive waste, the 19th of 21 shipments, totalling 150 tonnes, of 240 spent fuel elements from a Belgian research reactor, sent in the 1990s for reprocessing at Dounreay – and now, due to the decommissioning of Dounreay, being returned to Belgium.
The government’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority [NDA] says that the ship and its cargo had been categorised at the lowest level of safety concern – which seems odd, because you’d think it would need to be low level radioactive waste to be so classified, and that intermediate level waste would be higher up the risk scale.
It just so happens that the Parida incident follows shortly after the strange and so far unexplained behaviour of the Oceanic Pintail off the north of Scotland on Thursday last week.
This ship is the flagship of the small fleet of nuclear fuel carriers operated by International Nuclear Services [INS]. This is owned by the NDA, operating two nuclear transport ships itself; and owning two thirds of its subsidiary Pacific Nuclear Transport Ltd [with the French Areva nuclear conglomerate and a consortium of Japanese nuclear power companies ]– operating another 3 ships. All 5 of these ships are managed by Serco [who coincidentally also manage the Northlink Orkney ferry].
INS say of the Oceanic Pintail ‘It’s an INF3-class vessel – the highest level of the International Maritime Organisation’s INF code which regulates shipments by sea of packaged irradiated nuclear fuel, plutonium and high level radioactive wastes – with a wide range of safety features, including a double hull around cargo spaces, twin engines, and a comprehensive suite of built-in redundancy to all critical operating systems. There is always a back-up system ready to be brought into operation.’
This ship started life 27 years ago as the Pacific Pintail, was laid up at Barrow in Furness 4 years ago preparatory to decommissioning, but was resurrected and refurbished 2 years later, and renamed Oceanic Pintail after a £44 m plan for a replacement was scrapped to save money.
This ship arrived at Scrabster to conduct a test run back to Barrow in Furness in preparation for a series of trips shipping radioactive material. Last week it sailed out of Scrabster northward following the Orkney ferry route past the west coast of Hoy and then swung back southwest until about 10 miles off the mainland coast, spending the next 24 hours tracing an erratic course back and forth all the way to Cape Wrath, before docking once more at Scrabster. Why?
It surely couldn’t have been washing out something into the sea, could it?
What can we assume, and what can we not?
Some of the NATO ships participating in the current exercise off the west coast arrived via the Pentland Firth, but their journey through the area didn’t seem to coincide with the strange manoeuvres of the Oceanic Pintail.
You might think that this is far from Argyll and no concern of ours – but in the opposite direction, Sellafield has been permitted to quietly spew supposedly low level radioactive waste into the Irish Sea since 1952; and was discovered to have been responsible for dumping much more radioactivity than previously realised, including an estimated 200 kg of plutonium.
Some waste dissolved in the sea and was carried up through the North Channel and up the west coast past Argyll, while un-dissolved particles settled in the sea floor sediments both off the Cumbria coast and beyond the Isle of Man, towards Ireland.
There have been tragic cancer-related deaths of young people in both Kintyre and Islay that many suspected might be due to raised levels of radioactivity in the surrounding seas.
Back at Dounreay the safety track record of operations was so poor as to be fairly described as scandalous, with the notorious waste well on the shore leaking highly radioactive material into the sea; and other examples of almost unbelievable management stupidity – like the case of the overhead crane driver who died because standard safety procedure was to wear a radiation monitoring badge on his chest, when the radiation source was from directly below the crane cab.
And talking of track record, Direct Rail Services [DRS – another company in the NDA stable] has built a new freight terminal at Georgemas, outside Thurso, with a 110 ton gantry crane for transferring nuclear flasks from road to rail, for DRS trains to transport to Sellafield.
So transport by sea, with all its attendant risks, is not the only option – but perhaps the sea route has advantages for disposing of some radioactive waste that we’re unaware of; and we need to know what the Oceanic Pintail was doing all that Thursday off the north coast.
Robert Wakeham
