Britain has amassed a stockpile of more than 100 tonnes of plutonium, a report from the country's top science institution said today.
The stockpile is sufficient for 17,000 bombs of the size that flattened Japan's Nagasaki in 1945, notes the Royal Society.
The toxic stockpile, which has doubled in the last decade, comes mainly from reprocessing of spent uranium fuel from the country's nuclear power plants, the society said.
It added the practice must end if the stockpile is to stop growing."There should be no more separation of plutonium once current contracts have been fulfilled," said the society in its report Strategy options for the UK's separated plutonium.
Plutonium, one of the most radiotoxic materials known, is produced when spent uranium fuel from power stations is reprocessed to retrieve reusable uranium. It can be processed into mixed oxide fuel, but it can also be used in nuclear weapons.