When will reprocessing at Sellafield end?
The Magnox Reprocessing Plant (B205) was built in 1964 to reprocess spent nuclear waste fuel from Britain’s Magnox stations and two Magnox stations sold to Japan and Italy. BNFL has announced that B205 will close around the end of 2012 . The Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP) opened in 1994. It has contracts to reprocess spent nuclear waste fuel for British Energy and foreign utilities in Japan, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy and Sweden. It was originally expected that THORP would reprocess around 7,000 tonnes of spent nuclear waste fuel in its first ten years of operation – the so-called “baseload contracts”. But by 31st March 2004 it had reprocessed only a little over 5,000 tonnes. The plant has a few post-baseload contracts from British Energy and German utilities, but there are rumours the plant will close by 2010 at the latest.
