The Thorp nuclear reprocessing plant at Sellafield, once hailed by British Nuclear Fuels as the saviour of Britain's nuclear industry, is to close within seven years.
The plant in Cumbria, located on the coast of the Irish Sea, cost €2,571 million and was opened just nine years ago with the promise that it would help produce limitless electricity throughout the 21st century.
The premature demise of the plant will be hailed as a victory by the Government, which has lobbied against Thorp and other Sellafield activities for decades with little real effect.
However, it is unlikely to halt the legal case currently being taken by four Co Louth residents against Sellafield in an attempt to have the entire plant shut down.
The closure, reported in today's Guardian newspaper, has been confirmed by BNFL. Mr Brian Watson, director of the Sellafield site, said the company was changing from production into a nuclear-waste disposal company. The days of reprocessing spent fuel to produce plutonium and uranium for potential reuse are numbered.
"There is £30 billion worth of clean-up work here. We are switching from reprocessing to clean-up. We hope that will be seen in a more positive light," Mr Watson said.
Reprocessing was the nuclear dream. Now there are 75 tonnes of plutonium and 3,336 tonnes of uranium recovered from reprocessing at Sellafield, all stored and closely guarded but with no obvious use.
In a swipe at British government ministers, Mr Watson admitted: "It would greatly help our situation if we had some decisions from the government about what to do with all this."
BNFL is being changed from the owner of Sellafield into a management company since it became technically bankrupt two years ago, with liabilities now estimated at €58,571 million. The UK government is creating a nuclear decommissioning authority to take over the assets and liabilities.
The Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (Thorp) went into production in 1994 after a High Court battle over whether it was needed or justified. The company boasted of Thorp as Britain's largest yen earner because of its contracts to reprocess large imports of spent nuclear fuel from Japan.
Opposition to the plant was based on the fact that it produced plutonium and uranium that were not needed. The process also produced hard-to-handle radioactive liquid waste, all at a much higher cost than storing spent fuel which could eventually be disposed of.
Thorp was supposed to reprocess 7,000 tonnes of spent fuel in 10 years, but it is years late on its target and is being run at about 50 per cent of capacity.
This is because the dangerous liquid waste produced by reprocessing cannot be disposed of fast enough to satisfy Britain's safety regulators. The plant will close when it has fulfilled its current contracts, expected to be in 2010.
The closure of Thorp will come two years before that of a much older reprocessing works built on the Sellafield site in the 1950s for the Ministry of Defence to separate plutonium for nuclear weapons.
This will stay open until 2012, when all the old Magnox nuclear stations, which currently produce 8 per cent of the UK's electricity, are closed. All are running at a loss but are needed to keep electricity supplies up to demand.
Mr Watson's comments on the state of Sellafield were in sharp contrast to BNFL's annual report last month which trumpeted the achievements of both the reprocessing in Thorp and the vitrification plant which converts the liquid waste into glass blocks for eventual disposal. These tanks contain the highest level of radioactivity of any plant in Europe.
The only manufacturing left on the site when reprocessing goes will be the plant for making nuclear fuel from plutonium and uranium oxides. The Mox plant, opened last year, takes plutonium from the Thorp plant, but Mr Watson says it can remain open using some of the 75 tonnes of plutonium stored on site.