The Mox fuel plant at Sellafield in Cumbria, which employs 800 workers, is to close.
The plant takes plutonium which has been reprocessed from spent nuclear fuel at Sellafield’s Thorp plant, and recycles it into mixed oxide fuel, which can be reused to fuel nuclear reactors.
The Prospect union said it had been told the news by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and described it as “ill-conceived and short-sighted”.
The union said the closure decision was thought to have been influenced by the lack of funding available from Japanese government contracts, following the earthquake and tsunami which shut down the Fukushima 1 nuclear reactor in March.
Earlier this year, the British government launched a consultation into what to do with the UK’s stocks of civil plutonium, created by past nuclear power generation, which is housed at Sellafield and Dounreay. It was consulting on the view that the best solution would be to reuse it as a fuel.
Today’s announcement closes the UK’s only plant which processes plutonium into a mixed fuel for nuclear reactors, but the government consultation also looked at the possibility of building a new Mox plant, potentially at Sellafield.
The government has set out eight sites it considers suitable for new reactors around the country, including at Sellafield. It has insisted the disaster in Japan will not derail its plans for new nuclear power in the UK, which ministers claim is necessary to ensure energy security and cut emissions.
The NDA said that since securing new commercial arrangements for the Mox plant in April 2010, it had monitored progress to ensure that operations continued to improve and were delivering value for money.
A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said the decision to close the plant is an operational and commercial matter for the NDA. "However, it is clear that closure, whilst regrettable, is the only commercially viable option."
PA