Ed Milliband was warned he is 'throwing away' a valuable national resource. (Image: Getty)
Ed Milliband has been told he is "throwing away a gold mine" with Labour's plan to bury Britain's massive plutonium stockpile underground. The Energy Secretary has been urged to re-think the decision after industry figures waded into the debate, calling the move "utter vandalism".
The Labour minister agreed with the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) – which is tasked with cleaning up the UK’s earliest nuclear sites – to sink 140 tonnes of hazardous plutonium nuclear waste stored at Sellafield, Cumbria, under the sea.
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One industry source described the move to The Telegraph as "exceptionally stupid and short-sighted", while another previously described the stockpile – the largest in the world – as a "potential gold mine." The source said: "It is a valuable national resource. Frankly, from an energy standpoint, this decision is utter vandalism."
The NDA has looked at different ways to dispose of spent plutonium since 2011, including reprocessing it into so-called mixed oxide fuel (MOX). This could then be used by several cutting-edge reactors being developed by British companies like Moltex Energy and Newcleo as fuel.
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Ministers have backed plans to dispose of used plutonium (Image: Getty)
But that plan came to a dead-end on Friday when energy minister Michael Shanks told MPs leaving the radioactive waste in storage while the technology to process it continued to be developed was "a burden of security risks" for the UK and a ticking time-bomb for future generations to manage.
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He said: "It is the Government’s objective to put this material beyond reach, into a form which both reduces the long-term safety and security burden during storage and ensures it is suitable for disposal in a geological disposal facility. Implementing a long-term solution for plutonium is essential to dealing with the UK’s nuclear legacy and leaving the environment safer for future generations."
Plans to ditch the nuclear fuel underground were revealed in September. Before that, Tory ministers had been pushing to delay a decision by allowing the hazard by-product to sit at Sellafield, but this was regarded as too risky and expensive.
In 2023, Professor Clint Sharrad of the University of Manchester said while reprocessing the spent fuel sounded promising, it would take time, money and commitment. He said: "Being wary of the current global political and economic climate, it may be that extracting the energy from UK plutonium in the not-too-distant future becomes unnecessarily expensive and political barriers may be too difficult to overcome.
"Therefore, it might be simpler and cheaper to consider it a waste material alongside the other legacies from the nuclear industry and safely dispose of it." The NDA is said to be taking the new reprocessing technology into account but is unlikely to change its mind.
A final decision on investment is expected at the end of this decade, at which point reversing it would become even more difficult as construction would have already begun. Nuclear energy firm Newcleo said the Government had reassured them there may be potential to re-use the plutonium in the future and that the current decision was not a point of no return.
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Uranium (pictured) is another material used in creating nuclear energy (Image: Getty)
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Despite this, the decision meant that Newcleo abandoned plans to build a multi-billion-pound reprocessing plant in the UK and instead focused on investment in France. On Friday, Andrew Murdoch, Newcleo’s UK boss, said: “Naturally, we are disappointed by the timing of the Government’s change of policy announcement, which we believe dismisses the benefits of re-use on the basis that fast reactor technology such as Newcleo’s is not yet operational.
"That said, we were pleased to have a reassuring conversation this morning confirming that this policy position on plutonium material at Sellafield has no impact on our plans to develop lead fast reactor technology in the UK and use imported MOX from France, assuming regulatory standards are met."
Disposing of the waste will require baking it into glass or ceramic and then wrapping it in steel and concrete and burying it in a reinforced bunker under the sea, known as a geological disposal facility.
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The UK is considering three sites, including one off the coast of Cumbria, for its first-ever facility. The Government said this would create thousands of jobs.
Nuclear waste typically remains radioactive for as long as 100,000 years. The UK had plants capable of processing spent fuel at Sellafield, but it was closed in 2022.
A Government spokesman said: “Immobilising our stockpile of plutonium will put it in a safe and stable form for disposal while supporting thousands of skilled jobs and injecting billions into Cumbria over decades. It is the best long-term solution for cleaning up our nuclear legacy, and the material is not needed for our future nuclear reactors.”