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UK berated for building world's biggest plutonium stockpile

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

London, Nov 26, IRNA -- The UK government was criticised by eminent scientists and non-proliferation experts for stockpiling and building the world’s biggest arsenal of separated plutonium over the past 50 years.

The way 100 tonnes of the deadly powder is being stored at the country’s nuclear reprocessing plant at Sellafield, in north-west England is "ludicrous," the British Pugwash Group said.

The failure to make nuclear fuel from the plutonium at the expense of tax-payers’ money was “scandalous,” it said in a new report on “The Management of Separated Plutonium in the UK.”

“The strategy developed in the 1990s for utilising the UK stockpile of separated plutonium is currently in disarray. There is no immediately practicable policy to use the existing plutonium stockpile,” said the group’s deputy chair Christopher Watson.

“The UK does not have an agreed strategy for correcting its historical mistakes in this area, and the current arrangements for storing the stockpile are vulnerable to various threats (theft or terrorist attack),” Watson warned.

The Oxford University academic said that if other countries followed the UK’s historic practice on plutonium production, the “risk of nuclear weapon proliferation would increase.”

“The world does not at present have a sustainable energy strategy which does not involve producing substantial amounts of separated plutonium.”

The Pugwash Group, named after the Nova Scotia peace conference of scientists in 1957, identified three options for the management of the UK stockpile, do more than minimising the risks from leaving the plutonium, bury it or burn it to convert into nuclear fuel.

Watson suggested that the eventual solution may involve a mixture of two, and very possibly all three of the options, saying the UK has no alternative but to make option one work in the short-term.

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End News / IRNA / News Code 812774