Green light to restart Magnox Reprocessing

In response to the lockdown in March we safely paused a number of operations on the Sellafield site, including the controlled shutdown of the Magnox Reprocessing Plant.

Since then we’ve been working closely with government, Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), regulators and other stakeholders to understand the impacts on our plans for the completion of Magnox reprocessing.

We recently carried out a temporary ‘ramping up’ of the plant to finish processing some spent fuel that had remained in the plant while it was shut down.

Having carefully reviewed the situation with the NDA, we are now in a position to fully resume the Magnox reprocessing programme and reprocess the remaining Magnox spent fuel on the Sellafield site.

This remains the safest and most environmentally responsible way of managing this material.

We will keep the situation under constant review and will continue to communicate our progress, but we now expect Magnox reprocessing operations to be completed in 2021.