Taxpayer left with £48bn nuclear bill

The Government is to press ahead with controversial plans to put Britain's £48bn of civil nuclear clean-up liabilities into a fund financed by the taxpayer.

The move will pave the way for the part-privatisation of British Nuclear Fuels once it is shorn of the liabilities of decommissioning its Magnox nuclear reactors and the Sellafield reprocessing site in Cumbria.

A draft Bill to create the Nuclear Liabilities Agency will be published in this session of Parliament, but officials at the Department of Trade and Industry said the relevant legislation would not be introduced until the 2003-04 session.

The move will ease the way for the sale of BNFL's profitable Westinghouse and fuel fabrication businesses.

BNFL's chief executive, Norman Askew, welcomed the move, even though he said the timetable for setting up the agency had slipped by about six months. "In the scheme of things, that's not fatal," he said.

The anti-nuclear campaigner Greenpeace said the legislation raised the spectre of nuclear plants being built while the industry's historic liabilities were shovelled on to the taxpayer. "People living near the sites earmarked for new nuclear stations should be worried. All this when we have huge untapped reserves of renewable energy," a Greenpeace spokesman said.

There is speculation that the agency might also take on the £14bn in liabilities of the nuclear electricity generator British Energy.