Management of the UK ' s Civil Plutonium Stockpile
Management of the UK ' s Civil Plutonium Stockpile
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Pu Plutonium
( 239)
Trevor Jones has 40 years ' wide-ranging experience as a Consulting Scientist and Engineer. This article outlines the background to the 2025 policy decision regarding management of the UK ' s civil plutonium stockpile. in water, spent fuel could not be subject to long-term storage in cooling ponds. Reprocessing of spent fuel was therefore essential, and the UK started to accumulate stockpiles of separated“ civil” plutonium and uranium which exceeded military needs.( Use of the word“ stockpile” in this context is, of course, colloquial).
The UK civil nuclear industry officially began in 1956 with the opening of Calder Hall, which is celebrated as the world ' s first commercial-scale nuclear power station to supply electricity to a national grid. It wasn ' t until the 1970s and ' 80s that the government publicly acknowledged Calder Hall had a dual military function – to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. Its Magnox design utilising uranium metal fuel was an evolution of the early reactors built to produce plutonium for the UK ' s first atomic bombs – the Windscale Piles. The location of Calder Hall was chosen because it lay directly across the river from the Windscale facilities built to extract plutonium from irradiated fuel.
Calder Hall nuclear power station
The opening of Calder Hall was heralded as the dawn of a new era of productivity and prosperity in which nuclear-generated electricity would be“ too cheap to meter”. The UK embarked on an ambitious nuclear power programme throughout the 1960s, building a fleet of 26 Magnox reactors at 11 sites. However, because the magnesium alloy cladding of Magnox fuel elements degraded
Radiation Protection Today Winter 2025
Although the cost of maintaining the stockpiled materials safely and securely was never publicly acknowledged, their accumulation was justified as an investment on the basis that they could be used to make fuel for future generations of reactors. It was therefore decided that spent fuel from the next generation of Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors( AGRs) should also be reprocessed. This required the development of new technologies to reprocess ceramic uranium dioxide fuel.
As the civil nuclear power sector grew worldwide, the UK government saw the potential to earn significant revenue by providing nuclear services to overseas customers. British Nuclear Fuels Limited( BNFL) was therefore established in 1971 as a commercial business to sell fuel cycle services( uranium supply and enrichment, fuel fabrication and reprocessing). This led to the further expansion of reprocessing capabilities at Windscale( renamed Sellafield), including construction of the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant( THORP) which began in 1979.
Public opinion turned against nuclear power in the mid-1970s and ' 80s, primarily due to safety concerns, and the industry entered decline. However, the pendulum swung back in the late 1990s as concerns about climate change led to a renewed appreciation of nuclear as a large-scale, low-carbon energy source. Recognition that dealing with public
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