THORP CLOSURE

Early day motion 576, tabled 12 July 2005 by Paul Flynn (Labour). Signed by 35 members.

That this House welcomes the closure of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority's (NDA) THORP reprocessing plant at the BNFL Sellafield site following the serious leak of nearly 83,000 cubic centimetres of highly radioactive liquids including around 200 kilogrammes of plutonium in July 2004; notes with concern that the report of the BNFL Board of Inquiry into the leakage accident, published on the British Nuclear Group website on 26th May, states that `this event has demonstrated that despite high quality construction, serious faults can occur within THORP which breach primary containment. Given the history of such events so far, it seems likely that there will remain a significant chance of further plant failures occurring in the future even with the comprehensive implementation of the recommendations in this report,'; and believes that this is an entirely unacceptable risk to the workforce, the public, and the local and international environment, and that the Government should therefore take this opportunity to instruct the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority permanently to close THORP, to retrain its workforce, if neccessary, and to redeploy it on the NDA's mainstream activity of cleaning-up the nuclear contamination from 50 years of nuclear energy activities in the United Kingdom.

Signatures by party: Labour 19, Liberal Democrat 10, Plaid Cymru 3, DUP 1, Scottish National Party 1, Social Democratic and Labour Party 1.