The Government faces a series of decisions crucial to the credibility of its green credentials. Should we join with France, Japan and Russia in their astonishing amble of wishing to develop an international free market in plutonium, or do we decide to establish a genuinely balanced and sustainable energy policy and start the long process of cleaning up the nuclear power industry?

One of the most crucial of the these decisions concerns the future of ‘mixed oxide fuel’. March 16^th marked the end of the Environment Agency’s current public consultation on British Nuclear Fuels’ application to start commercial production of MOX, which is a combination of uranium and plutonium – the prime nuclear explosive named after Pluto, the God of Hell.

The likelihood is that the agency will decide to recommend approval of the Sellafield MOX plant, largely on the strength of a report by the mysterious PA Consultants. The relationship between BNFL, the Environment Agency and PA Consultants remains unexamined. Unsurprisingly, the consultants’ recommendation is that the Sellafield plant should be authorised as, they argue, there is an economic case for MOX.

Although the PA Consultants’ report has now been placed in the House of Commons Library, the key passages which would have allowed their conclusions to be evaluated have not been included, on the grounds of commercial confidentiality.

The past six months have also seen a series of other major reports on different aspects of nuclear power. In October, the Science Policy Research Unit at Sussex University published Managing UK Nuclear Liabilites, which concluded that the total cost to the public purse of Britain’s civil nuclear liabilities now totals £42 billion. In November, the International MOX Assessment concluded, on economic, environmental and safety grounds, that the MOX project should be abandoned.

Later that month, the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology published Radioactive Waste – Where Next? Which called for a radically different approach to the urgent problem of nuclear waste management. In January, the Government Panel on Sustainable Development presented its fourth report and drew attention to the lack of action on the nuclear waste problem since it was highlighted in its third report 12 months previously. The recent report Management of Separated Plutonium, published by the Royal Society, emphasised the dangers of the growing nuclear stockpile. And the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee has set up an enquiry into radioactive waste management policy which will report in the summer.

Against that background, it is remarkable that we should even be considering the major expansion of the nuclear industry represented by the plans to produce MOX commercially and sell it internationally.

There are two key arguments against MOX: the threat of nuclear proliferation and the dangers of nuclear transportation.

Last December’s International MOX Assessment Report revealed, for the first time, that a crude nuclear weapon has already been constructed from reactor-grade plutonium, following years of denials by the nuclear industry that this was possible. This confirms that each of the 430 operating nuclear reactors throughout the world is a prospective nuclear weapons factory. The new International Guidelines for the Management of Plutonium recently claimed that Sellafield now has a stockpile of over 100,000 kilos of plutonium – enough to construct 30 nuclear bombs of the same yield as that which destroyed Nagasaki.

In the context of the recent events in Iraq, it is worth remembering that for 13 years after we joined the European Economic Community, Britain refused access to Sellafield for Euratom safety inspectors, precisely to disguise the full extent of the growing plutonium stockpile which fed the production line for our own weapons of mass destruction.

The frightening truth about the whole reprocessing programme is that no one ever knows precisely how much plutonium is produced, separated or stockpiled because all the calculations are based on estimates. In the past 25 years, Sellafield has theoretically lost 80 kilos of plutonium. No one knows if this is due to inaccurate estimates or terrorist theft.

The nuclear flights scenario has been well publicised in the past few months. And there are ongoing scares about the routine transportation of nuclear weapons and other nuclear material which are all well documented by the Nuclear Free Local Authorities Steering Committee. But the full details of the debate over the safety of the containers which would be used to fly MOX fuel around the world have yet to be established. Why is it that the United States has refused to authorise the Type B containers that BNFL wants to use? Why have these containers not been tested in severe accident conditions? Why is there a cover-up about the comparative ease with which MOX fuel pellets can be separated into their constituent elements of uranium and plutonium? Does anyone outside the nuclear establishment seriously believe that regular international airborne transports of MOX fuel would not be a sitting target for nuclear terrorists?

Almost 140 MPs of all parties have now signed Early Day Motion 348 (Plutonium Stockpiles) opposing the MOX option and calling for a national strategy to deal with nuclear waste.

Many more would do so if they were presented with the economic and environmental arguments against the creation of an international free market in plutonium and in favour of an integrated and sustainable energy policy, including a strategy for the disposal of spent nuclear fuel and other radioactive waste.

Tribune readers should raise this issue with their Member of Parliament, now. We must highlight the horrific economic and environmental cost of the plutonium economy and ensure the Government is aware that its decisions on MOX, radioactive discharges and radioactive waste management will constitute the acid test of our pledge to put the environment at the heart of policy making.

Post-Kyoto, the nuclear industry is desperate. We must ensure that this desperation does not lead us to poison the planet for generations to come.

This article was published in Tribune on April 3rd 1998.