(Image: Sellafield Ltd)The second of three planned shipments of high-level radioactive waste has left the Sellafield site in northwest England and is being transported by rail and sea to its destination at the Isar interim storage facility in Germany.Seven flasks containing the vitrified residues - the radioactive waste has been transformed into a stable glass-like form - travelled by rail to the port of Barrow-in-Furness before being loaded on to Pacific Grebe, a specialist nuclear transport vessel operated by the UK's Nuclear Transport Solutions, which set sail on Wednesday.The first shipment, of six flasks each with 28 containers of high level waste, to Biblis, took place in 2020.The waste comes from the reprocessing and recycling of Germany's used nuclear fuel at the Sellafield site, with Nuclear Transport Solutions saying: "Vitrified Residue Returns are a key component of the UK’s strategy to repatriate high- level waste from the Sellafield site, fulfil overseas contracts and deliver on government policy."According to Germany's Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management (BASE) the transport licence was approved in December, with the repatriation of German waste a binding requirement under international law.In its guide to the waste it says that until 2005 German utilities shipped used fuel from nuclear power plants to La Hague in France and Sellafield in the UK for reprocessing: "The resulting liquid waste...
