Revealed: three tonnes of uranium legally dumped in protected English estuary in nine years
The Environment Agency has allowed a firm to dump three tonnes of uranium into one of England's most protected sites over the past nine years, it can be revealed, with experts sounding alarm over the potential environmental impact of these discharges.
Documents obtained by the Guardian and the Ends Report through freedom of information requests show that a nuclear fuel factory near Preston discharged large quantities of uranium – legally, under its environmental permit conditions – into the River Ribble between 2015 and 2024. The discharges peaked in 2015 when 703kg of uranium was discharged, according to the documents.
Raw uranium rock mined from all over the world is brought to the Springfields Fuels factory in Lea Town, a small village roughly five miles from Preston, where the rock is treated and purified to create uranium fuel rods.
According to the factory's website, it has supplied several million fuel elements to reactors in 11 different countries.
The discharge point for the uranium releases is located within the Ribble estuary marine conservation zone, which is one of the most protected sites in the country – classified as a site of special scientific interest, a special protection area (SPA) and a Ramsar site (a wetland designated as being of international importance).
The government's latest Radioactivity in Food and the Environment report, published in November 2024, notes that in 2023 the total dose of radiation from Springfields Fuels was approximately 4% of the dose limit that is set to protect members of the public from radiation.
However, Dr Ian Fairlile, an independent consultant on radioactivity in the environment, who was a scientific secretary to the UK government's committee examining radiation risks of internal emitters, said that in terms of radioactivity, the discharges from Springfields Fuels were a 'very large amount'.
'I'm concerned at this high level. It's worrying', he said, referring specifically to the 2015 discharge.
In a 2009 assessment, the Environment Agency concluded that the total dose rate of radioactivity for the Ribble and Alt estuaries SPA was 'significantly in excess' of the agreed threshold of 40 microgray/h, below which regulators have agreed there would be no adverse effect to the integrity of a protected site. The report found the calculated total dose rate for the worst affected organism in the estuary was more than 10 times higher than this threshold, with discharges of radionuclides from the Springfields Fuels site to blame.
As a result, a more detailed assessment was undertaken. In this latter report, it was concluded that based on new permitted discharge limits, which had been lowered due to planned operational changes at Springfields Fuels, the dose rates to wildlife were below the agreed threshold and therefore there was no adverse effect on the integrity of the protected site.
Under the site's current environmental permit, there is no limit on the weight of uranium discharges, which in itself has raised eyebrows. Instead, the uranium discharge is limited in terms of its radioactivity, with an annual limit of 0.04 terabecquerels. Prior to this, the discharge limit in terms of radioactivity was 0.1 terabecquerels.
A terabecquerel is a unit of radioactivity equal to 1tn becquerels. One becquerel represents a rate of radioactive decay equal to one radioactive decay per second.
Despite this tighter limit having been agreed six years ago, experts have raised concerns over the continued authorised discharges from the site.
Fairlile specifically questioned the Environment Agency's modelling of how this discharge level could be classified as safe. 'This is a very high level. The Environment Agency's risk modelling might be unreliable. Which would make its discharge limits unsafe', he said.
The Environment Agency said its processes for assessing impacts to habitats were 'robust and follow international best practice, including the use of a tiered assessment approach'.
Dr Patrick Byrne, a reader in hydrology and environmental pollution at Liverpool John Moores University, said the 703kg of uranium discharged in 2015 was an 'exceptionally high volume'.
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Dr Doug Parr, a policy director at Greenpeace UK, said: 'Discharges of heavy metals into the environment are never good, especially when those metals are radioactive.'
An Environment Agency spokesperson declined to comment directly, but the regulator said it set 'strict environmental permit conditions for all nuclear operators in England, including Springfields Fuels Limited'.
It said these permits were based on 'detailed technical assessments and are designed to ensure that any discharges of radioactive substances, including uranium, do not pose an unacceptable risk to people or the environment'.
While the government's Radioactivity in Food and the Environment report found sources of radiation from Springfield Fuels were approximately 4% of the dose limit to members of the public, it also concluded that radionuclides – specifically isotopes of uranium – were detected downstream in sediment and biota in the Ribble estuary due to discharges from Springfields.
This is not the first time uranium levels in the estuary silt have been noted. Research conducted by the British Geological Survey (BGS) in 2002 detected 'anomalously high' concentrations of uranium in a silt sample downstream of the Springfields facility.
The highest level recorded in the BGS report was 60μg/g of uranium in the silt – compared with a background level of 3-4μg/g. The researchers described this as a 'significant anomaly'.
The Environment Agency said environmental monitoring conducted by the regulator itself and by Springfields Fuels to assess the impact of the discharges on people and the environment had 'not shown cause for concern'.
The UK is looking to expand its nuclear fuel production capabilities, including at Springfields Fuels. This is in order to increase energy security and reduce reliance on Russian fuel, and to deliver on a target of 24GW of new nuclear capacity by 2050.
Springfield Fuels did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
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