London

Britain took its first steps towards dealing with its stockpile of nuclear waste last week, when the government announced a new public body to clean up what it terms the country's “nuclear legacy”.

The Liabilities Management Authority (LMA) will be responsible for treating and packaging waste from nuclear-fuel reprocessing and contaminated material from nuclear power stations, and for cleaning up their sites and the surrounding land.

But it won't tackle materials from the nuclear-weapons programme or consider the need for long-term waste disposal. Even so, the clean-up is expected to cost some £48 billion (US$73 billion) over several decades.

Announcing the plan in a white paper on 4 July, energy minister Brian Wilson pledged that the new authority would implement the clean-up safely, securely and cost-effectively.

The LMA will take over responsibility for the civil nuclear plants operated by the government-owned British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL). But BNFL will continue to operate the sites, including the reprocessing plant at Sellafield in northwest England, under licence. By effectively taking the cost of waste treatment off BNFL's balance sheet, the move opens the door to the part-privatization of the company.

Geoffrey Boulton, vice-principal of the University of Edinburgh and chair of a Royal Society working party on the management of radioactive waste, cautiously welcomed the move. “In broad terms it's sensible because something has to be done, but it still needs to be meshed into a more complete solution,” Boulton says.

“This is about how to get the waste into the tins, not what to do with the tins,” says one official. A separate government consultative process addressing wider issues, including the long-term storage of waste, is expected to report this year.

Britain's plans to store nuclear waste permanently were thrown into disarray in 1997, when research into a deep-storage facility at Sellafield collapsed after planning permission for an underground laboratory had been refused (see Nature 386, 423; 199710.1038/386423a0).