Japan has its own warped institutional reasons for engaging in this trade. Its fast breeder programme, which was to have used the plutonium extracted from the waste it sent to Sellafield for reprocessing, collapsed after an accident in 1995. But it remains contractually bound to BNFL to re-import its plutonium. So it has asked the company to turn it into Mox, which it can use (at considerable hazard) in its light water reactors.
The dirty bombs BNFL is about to launch onto the high seas will be, it hopes, among the first of many. To avoid creating the impression that this freight might possibly be dangerous, Japan has insisted that the ships have no military escort. They have weapons on board, but neither the radar-guided anti-missile defences nor the speed required to evade an attack from a fast boat.
To spread plutonium across an entire region, terrorists need only send a missile or boat like the one Bin Laden used to attack the USS Cole, equipped with the right explosives, into the side of one of the freighters. The Mox fuel is stored in containers which can resist temperatures of 800C for 30 minutes. Fires on ships, as the Ecologist magazine has pointed out, can burn for 24 hours at 1000C.
Stealing the material is a matter of overwhelming the 26 British policemen on board and blowing the hatches off, a task well within the capabilities of several terrorist groups and all of the world's aspirant nuclear states. The plutonium and uranium can be separated with chemical processes less taxing than the manufacture of designer drugs.
The dirty bombs BNFL is about to launch onto the high seas will be, it hopes, among the first of many. To avoid creating the impression that this freight might possibly be dangerous, Japan has insisted that the ships have no military escort. They have weapons on board, but neither the radar-guided anti-missile defences nor the speed required to evade an attack from a fast boat.
To spread plutonium across an entire region, terrorists need only send a missile or boat like the one Bin Laden used to attack the USS Cole, equipped with the right explosives, into the side of one of the freighters. The Mox fuel is stored in containers which can resist temperatures of 800C for 30 minutes. Fires on ships, as the Ecologist magazine has pointed out, can burn for 24 hours at 1000C.
Stealing the material is a matter of overwhelming the 26 British policemen on board and blowing the hatches off, a task well within the capabilities of several terrorist groups and all of the world's aspirant nuclear states. The plutonium and uranium can be separated with chemical processes less taxing than the manufacture of designer drugs.