Forge thy tongue on an anvil of truth and what flies up, though it be but a spark, will have light.
Pindar
Almost every week, a train leaves the railhead near the Sizewell power station in Suffolk carrying 1-3 flasks loaded on flatbed trucks along the single-track freight line through Leiston to Saxmundham to join the main line and then on through Ipswich, Colchester and Chelmsford and on through London. Similar trains leave Bradwell nuclear power station in Essex, though this transport will soon cease as Bradwell has been shut down for some years.
These flasks are water-filled lead-lined steel containers loaded with highly radioactive nuclear fuel rods. These are removed from the power station's reactor when "spent" and extremely hot and are plunged into ponds at site to cool down. They then have to be transported to Sellafield in Cumbria to be "reprocessed" - the plutonium and uranium they contain separated out - before the magnesium oxide sheath around them disintegrates in the water.
If the flasks were breached then highly radioactive material would be released and it is estimated that thousands of people would be killed downwind in a built-up area.
So it is important that they don't break open! They are built to withstand temperatures of up to 800°C centigrade for half-an-hour or a fall of 9 metres onto a hard surface and are tested to ensure they do so. These are clearly not worst-case scenarios. However, in some 50 years of operation no such breakage has occurred.
But these flasks have never been tested to withstand a terrorist attack. And that such an attack is easily possible was proved by a Daily Mirror reporter who last July, managed to plant a fake bomb on a low-loader carrying "spent" nuclear fuel rods in sidings at Willesden Junction. Presumably the same might be at the Sizewell railhead. Or a terrorist could fire a missile into a flask from the side of the track anywhere along the thousands of miles such flasks travel from nuclear power stations on their way to Sellafield.
David Polden, Nuclear Trains Action Group, 162 Holloway Road N7 8DQ.
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