• Home /
• Statewatch Database /
• Plutonium flights to Japan

Plutonium flights to Japan

01 January 1991

Plutonium flights to Japan
artdoc May=1992

Northern European Nuclear Information Group (NENIG)
February 1990

The plan to fly plutonium from Britain to Japan, along air
routes which would pass over the North Atlantic, looks once
more to be a possibility.

It had appeared that the plans would be cancelled after the USA
demanded that the plutonium must be carried in containers
designed to new US regulations which require the containers to
survive a 630 mile per hour crash. This is a very onerous
requirement, well above the requirements of the International
Atomic Energy Agency, (IAEA), who currently set the speed of
the crash at only 30 miles per hour, and plan to increase it
to only 190 miles per hour. It was believed that it would be
impossible to design an economic container to-survive the 630
miles per hour crash, and it therefore appeared that the
plutonium could not be flown to Japan, but would have to go by
sea.

It has now been revealed that the US Department of Energy has
been lobbying to have the new US Regulations changed, so that
the speed of the design crash is the 190 miles per hour
proposed by the IAEA. This is partly because the proposal for
the transport of the plutonium by sea has given rite to
political difficulties associated with fears of terrorist
attack on the ship carrying the plutonium.

Another reason for the proposed change is the failure of trial
plutonium air transport casks in tests in the USA. These casks
failed at a speed of 288 miles per hour, well below the
proposed 630 miles per hour design speed for the crash.

NENIG believes that the reduction of the design crash speed
from 630 to 190 miles per hour is quite unacceptable. The 630
miles per hour was based on measurements of an actual aircraft
crash in the USA in 1987, and any lower design speed could lead
to the failure of a container if they were in an aircraft which
crashed.