munich

Britain has temporarily waived an agreement that reprocessed nuclear fuel must be returned to its country of origin to enable it to accept a consignment of fresh and spent fuel from Georgia.

The 5.1-kg consignment, from a shut-down research reactor near Tbilisi, was transferred to a reprocessing facility at Dounreay in northern Scotland last week. The move, which has been harshly criticized by some anti-nuclear activists, was designed to reduce the risk of illegal trade in weapons-grade uranium.

Critics are angry that the agreement to import the fuel, reached between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President Bill Clinton, was not debated publicly, and did not take into account recent concerns about safety at the Dounreay reprocessing plants, which are at present standing idle.

Only hours before the government's announcement, the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII), part of the UK government's Health and Safety Executive, had announced a ban on the import of radio-active material for reprocessing until a complete safety audit and an assessment of the plant's waste-management capability had been carried out.

In recent years, fragments of highly enriched uranium have been found on beaches near the facility, and at least one serious leak — in the dissolver tank of its fast reprocessing plant — occurred in 1996. Bringing the Dounreay plants to a safety level acceptable to the NII could take two years.

Most of the Georgian consignment is fresh fuel, which the UK Foreign Office says will be used up as raw material in Dounreay's facilities for producing medical isotopes. Only 0.8 kg is spent fuel requiring reprocessing; this will be stored on site until Dounreay gets the green light to recommence reprocessing.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the nuclear powers have been sharing the responsibility for nuclear safety. The United States, for example, has taken 600 kg of highly enriched uranium (HEU) out of Kazakhstan, while Canada, Germany and France have helped tighten up safety at nuclear reactors.

“There is certainly a feeling that Britain should share some of the burden,” says a UK government spokesman, arguing that there has been a “considerable overreaction to the decision to take in such a small amount of fuel”.

The research reactor from which the fuel originates is at the Georgia Institute of Physics — near Tbilisi, Georgia's capital — which stopped operations after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

During the Soviet era, Georgia could ship its spent fuel to the Russian nuclear complex at Chelyabinsk in the Ural mountains. But in 1991 Russia ended the arrangement because, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Georgia's status as a foreign country meant it was no longer eligible to use the Urals site.

A spokesman for the environmental group Greenpeace International, Mike Townsley, reluctantly accepts the “superficial logic” of bringing the Georgian fuel to Britain, despite concerns about safety at Dounreay, in view of bigger nuclear proliferation issues. “Given the choice between terrorists and ‘mad scientists’, it is obviously better to come down on the side of ‘mad scientists’,” he says.

“But more importantly, the Georgia affair is a wake-up call for Britain to the general dangers of the movement of weapons-grade nuclear material which is scattered around the world.” Greenpeace International is calling for an immediate full and open debate on the issue.

Britain's own rules for reprocessing foreign radioactive waste require that reprocessed fuel be returned to the country of origin for long-term storage, to prevent Britain becoming a ‘nuclear dumping ground’. But this rule was waived on a ‘one-off’ basis for the Georgian consignment in the interests of non-proliferation, says a spokesman for the Health and Safety Executive.

US rules for supplying HEU to research reactors require that the nuclear waste be returned to the United States for storage and reprocessing, to prevent commerce in bomb-grade uranium. As a consequence, Dounreay has had difficulties finding customers for its reprocessing facilities, and had to put its main reprocessing plant on idle in 1996.

But Dounreay had hoped to start reprocessing again soon, after recently winning two large contracts to reprocess spent HEU fuel rods from research reactors. One is with ICI in England, which had originally received its HEU el from Russia; handling its waste will require Dounreay to obtain permission to open its new reprocessing plant designed for aluminium-clad fuel.

The other contract is with the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization near Sydney (see Nature 389, 109; 1997), whose research reactor was supplied with HEU fuel by Britain in the 1960s. Both the Australian body and ICI have been informed that Dounreay cannot at present accept their fuel.