A Place to Stand

The value of the depleted Uranium stored at Sellafield is currently seen to be negligible. There will be some 106,000 tonnes in store by 2020. The only current use is for making armour piercing munitions. This is fertile nuclear material with an energy content of 1,000 MW thermal days/tonne. At a wholesale price of 1.3p/kWh of carbon free electricity, each tonne is worth $156 million so the whole store has an eventual commercial value of £16.5 trillion & could supply all UK needs for 600 years. In units of Billions of Barrels of Oil equivalent, this Uranium has energy content 5 times the oil reserves in Saudi Arabia or 75 times the amount extracted from the North Sea. We are likely to use a trillion pounds worth by the end of this century.

The imminent final sell off of British Nuclear Fuels to 1 of 6 international consortia should not transfer ownership of this to the new contractors. This would be a bargain not seen since the Louisiana Purchase.
From a briefing to SONE by Brendan McNamara. Membership here.

In its enthusiasm to bankrupt our nuclear industry & nationalise the remnants without payment, Labour insisted on giving BNFL's overseas assets away at fire sale prices (because Patricia Hewitt insisted that Bruce Power be sold off within 10 weeks they got £275 million for an asset previously valued at £900 million & Westinghouse, which previously belonged to BNFL was bought by Toshiba & is now a contender to be building Britain's new nuclear stations. Of course this was back when Labour were anti-nuclear - the fact that they are now marginally more sensible than the Tories & infinitely moreso than the LudDems suggests that grossly incompetent though they are the other parties aren't better. Let us hope that they don't give away £16,500 trillion pounds because they haven't noticed it is worth anything.