Hoping to get rid of its 112-tonne stockpile of plutonium, the UK government said last week that it was considering building a plant to recycle the plutonium into mixed oxide fuel (MOX). The move comes just four months after the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority announced the closure of the country's only nuclear reprocessing facility, at Sellafield (see Nature 476, 140; 2011). That plant (one of only two commercial MOX facilities in the world) has been beset with technical problems.
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