The decommissioning, over a possible 60 years, of the Dounreay nuclear reprocessing plant in Scotland was welcomed yesterday by the Dublin Government.
The announcement by the British Energy Minister, Mr John Battle, was seen as a huge U-turn on the part of the British government which had staunchly defended the reprocessing plant from criticism in recent months.
In Dublin, the Minister of State at the Department of Public Enterprise, Mr Joe Jacob, said it was "a step in the right direction" as it amounted to a gradual phaseout of operations.
But the Irish Green Party MEP, Ms Patricia McKenna, described as "outrageous" a claim by Mr Battle that "reprocessing is a necessary part of the decommissioning process and of securing the site for the future". She said this was an attempt to mislead the genuinely concerned public.
She called for an immediate end to discharges from Dounreay and Sellafield. The British government was considering new authorisation for Sellafield discharges which would mean 30 thousand million litres more of nuclear waste in the Irish Sea over the next decade, she claimed. "This is a key opportunity for the Irish Government to take decisive action." Mr Jacob said Irish concern over Dounreay related to waste in the disposal shaft and radioactive discharges into the environment. These concerns had been raised with British officials as recently as yesterday.
There was public outcry when it was learned that the British government had secretly agreed to allow a quantity of nuclear waste from the former Soviet state of Georgia to be flown to the plant for treatment. A report this week also said that 170 kilogrammes of enriched uranium, enough to make 10 nuclear bombs, had disappeared between 1965 and 1968 at Dounreay.
But this was later denied by Britain's Atomic Energy chief, Mr John McEwan, who said the discrepancy was due to an accounting error and that the "missing" fuel had never existed.
"This is not a soap factory, you can't just shut the gates one day and walk away the next," said Ms Lorraine Mann, head of the Scotland Against Nuclear Dumping campaign, hailing the decision.
In a statement to parliament, Mr Battle said Britain's Atomic Energy Authority had advised him that there was "no economic case" for supporting the reprocessing work in the longer term.
A British government spokesman said yesterday this had not been a sudden decision and insisted that Dounreay was still safe. But the Scottish National Party leader, Mr Alex Salmond, told BBC Radio Scotland: "Anyone with an interest in these matters has known for some considerable time that Dounreay is not in a condition where it is safe to take any extra nuclear material to it."