Analysis: The Republic has a long fight on its hands if it hopes to win a permanent closure of the Sellafield nuclear complex. The complex in Cumbria includes three old experimental nuclear reactors, four shut down nuclear power plants and thousands of tonnes of radioactive fuel and high-level wastes.
Included among them is the infamous Windscale Pile One experimental reactor that caught fire in October 1957 to cause the world's first major nuclear accident. It could take until 2050 to fully decommission it, according to the UK's Atomic Energy Agency.
Then there is the ongoing risk that the site in Cumbria will once again be proposed as a home for a permanent underground waste repository, a choice that would make Sellafield a radioactive danger forever.
The EU has a draft directive ready that requires all states to deal with their high-level radioactive waste, a directive which may force Britain's hand on the underground storage issue.
There are decades of clean-up ahead to make all this Sellafield material safe, the legacy of more than 50 years of Britain's nuclear industry.
The material on site will remain radioactive and a danger for 250,000 years.
Thorp, expected to close in 2010, represents only one small part of the overall picture. And while this plant may cease its original role as a reprocessing unit for plutonium and uranium, it may yet be converted to handle material coming from dismantled nuclear reactors.
This could extend, not shorten, the life of the Thorp plant, explains Dr Tony Colgan, principal scientific officer with the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland. If modified to handle reactor parts or other materials it would continue to discharge radioactivity into the Irish Sea, he said. "If they put material through the Thorp plant it would produce waste."
He agrees with the view held by safety experts that reprocessing should continue in Sellafield's Thorp and Magnox plants until all spent fuel can be converted to a safer form. "Realistically the best thing that can be done right now is to put the fuel through Thorp and Magnox," he said yesterday. "Magnox \ has to be dealt with, it can't go into long term storage."
This, however, would add to the radioactive waste stream flowing into the Irish Sea, he said. It would also increase the already massive 3,336 tonnes of uranium, 75 tonnes of plutonium and 1,575 cubic metres of high-level liquid waste held on the site.
"The UK is going to have to address the high-level storage issue," Dr Colgan said, not least because the UK's Health and Safety Authority considers it a serious risk. There is now the EU's Nuclear Safety Package, a draft directive that requires member- states to make their radioactive waste stores safe.
The directive may force the UK once again to consider an underground nuclear waste repository, a proposal put forward more than 10 years ago by Nirex, set up by the nuclear industry itself to study deep burial of radioactive waste.
Nirex put forward plans for a deep repository on the Sellafield site and sought to build an underground "rock characterisation" lab, but planning was finally refused in 1997. It has not been raised since but this is a good option according to one expert, who suggested, "Sellafield is the obvious place" given its history and geology.
The US Department of Energy's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management has pursued the burial option at its Yucca Mountain deep repository site in Nye County, Nevada. Located about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, it will receive all US civilian and military high-level waste except from old nuclear weapons.
Thorp reprocessing should cease in 2010 and the Magnox reprocessing plant close by 2012, but there are no plans to shut the newest facility at Sellafield, its MOX nuclear fuel plant. It produces reactor fuel pellets using plutonium and uranium stores held at Sellafield.
Nuclear reactors at Sellafield include Windscale One and Two, two of Britain's earliest reactors, built in the 1940s to produce weapons plutonium.
Both are now being dismantled, along with the experimental Windscale Advanced Gas-Cooled reactor. Their decommissioning, however, won't be completed before 2050, an activity that will produce a huge volume of radioactive waste that will have to be stored or processed at Sellafield.