The other Brexit has been forgotten: leaving Europe's nuclear community is just as fraught with fissile hazard

The surreal rules of Brexit talks - seemingly imposed by Brussels - mean that ministers may no longer reveal policy on critical matters to Parliamentary oversight committees.

The Labour Manifesto makes a glancing reference to nuclear power. It asserts with Johnsonian insouciance that we will have our cake and eat it, declaring that we will both leave the EU and retain access to Euratom. No further explanation is offered.

Warnings from nuclear specialists have been stark: if Britain has not locked in an alternative treaty structure or transition accord by March 2019, it will be cut adrift from the global  nuclear industry. Nobody will be allowed to deal with us.

“Euratom has ownership over all nuclear materials in the EU. It oversees all supply. Without this we cannot move anything at all between third parties,” said Dame Sue Ion, chairman of the Nuclear Innovation and Research Advisory Board.

“This covers all components in the nuclear world, and that includes anything you need to build Hinkley Point," she said.

“It is entirely possible in principle to negotiate an equivalent regime reporting to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), but that is not a paper exercise. It is extremely difficult to do in two years. Even if we are ready to go, other countries are painfully slow with these sorts of agreements,” she said.

The UK ceded treaty control over its nuclear industry to Euratom when the country joined the EU, just as it ceded treaty control over trade deals. The agency's staff - many of them British - carry out all our inspections. They have permanent operations at Sellafield.

These powers can be repatriated but doing so does not restore Britain to the legal status quo ante. The UK would then be in limbo. It would have to negotiate 18 fresh treaty agreements with the US, Japan, Korea, Kazakhstan and other states.

This is not as easy at looks. Nuclear diplomacy is full of snares. It took four years for Euratom to update a nuclear deal with the US in the 1990s. An unholy alliance of Left and Right emerged to oppose it. Hawks said the EU could not be trusted to meet tough US non-proliferation rules, warning that France and Germany would transfer US-sourced material to hostile regimes in the Mid-East.

The US Senate held up ratification. All trans-Atlantic trade nuclear material was frozen for three months at one stage. It is a salutary lesson. “We will be subject to the political whims of other countries,” said Jonathan Leech, a nuclear lawyer at Prospect.

It is well-known that the UK’s ageing nuclear power plants provide a fifth of the country’s electricity. Half of this capacity is to be phased out over the next eight years and must be replaced. Hinkley Point and the next generation of Asian-linked ventures all require a treaty framework.

Less known is that Britain also has a flourishing business in the nuclear supply chain. Urenco in Chester is a world leader in centrifuge and uranium enrichment. The nuclear industry as a whole employs 65,000 people, supporting a well-paid, high-tech, industrial eco-system.  

Some doomsday warnings are clearly hyperbole. Britain will not run out of nuclear fuel the day after leaving Euratom. There has been a glut of the raw material - ‘yellow cake’ - ever since Japan shut most of its reactors after Fukushima. It can be imported in advance and stockpiled with a little effort. “The whole world is desperate to sell us the stuff, so that argument is just nonsense,” said Ian Scott, founder of the nuclear group Moltex.

The House Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee muddied the waters in a report earlier this month by suggesting that Downing Street is needlessly pulling out for ideological reasons, in order to escape the jurisdiction of the European Court (ECJ).

It cited testimony from Manchester University professor Grace Burke - an expert on nuclear materials - stating that leaving Euratom is "ill-informed, irresponsible and unnecessary".

The report said the Government had “failed to consider the potentially disastrous ramifications of its Brexit objectives for the nuclear industry. Ministers must act as urgently as possible. The repercussions of failing to do so are huge."

This is a misunderstanding,  typical of all discussions over Brexit. The European Commission’s legal services have concluded that Britain must leave Euratom under the Article 50 process.

Brussels argues that there is no choice because the nuclear agency was long ago subsumed into the EU structure. On this point EU lawyers and UK government lawyers are in total agreement.  "We wish it were not so, but sadly nothing can be done," one EU official told The Daily Telegraph.

There are few complaints about Euratom as such. Even eurosceptics extol its virtues. They would rather stay if possible. It is the framework for the UK role in the Joint European Torus (JET) fusion project at Culham in Oxfordshire, and for a range of advanced research initiatives in which Britain plays a key role.

While Euratom comes under European Court jurisdiction, this is narrowly-constrained. It implies no broad sway over other areas of UK law.

What Britain could do is to remain in Euratom as an associate member and defer to ECJ judges. Switzerland is the sole precedent for this. That arrangement was made hostage to Swiss capitulation on free movement of people, but Britain is obviously not Switzerland.

Our case is sui generis. Britain is the only big country in Western Europe planning a clutch of new reactors. It is sitting on 130 tons of civil plutonium at Sellafield, carefully storied and guarded in underground sites able to withstand a 9/11 aircraft suicide attack. It is the world's biggest stock, enough to make 15,000 or more Hiroshima-size bombs.

Britain is a nuclear weapons power and an anchor of the NATO alliance. All this makes it much more important for the EU to reach a workable formula. To exploit the Euratom issue for horse-trading on Brexit would signal a breakdown in global governance and call into question the EU's own credibility.

One thing is already clear. Leaked Brexit documents from Brussels state that the EU will wash its hands of all responsibility for the radioactive waste imported from Germany and other EU states that is stored at Sellafield on Euratom's behalf.

This makes our problem yet bigger. The fissile material has a radioactive half-life of tens of thousands of years. It is treated as a liability on Government books. There have been plans from time to time - and still are such plans - to bury it at huge cost thousands of feet below ground.

Yet we could turn this headache into a bonanza. With the right technology, the plutonium residue can be harnessed as a fuel. "In the long-term it is incredibly valuable. It would be crazy to bury it," said Dame Sue Ion.

A generation of small modular reactors (SMRs) is on the horizon that promise to use up much of this fissile material safely, potentially generating power at a far lower cost than Hinkley Point. The process also renders what remains unusable in nuclear weapons.

The Washington think tank Third Way has identified fifty advanced reactor projects in North America, including eight based on molten salt. These types of reactors operate at atmospheric pressure so they can be much smaller. When they get too hot, a freeze plug melts and the salts drain off.

GE Hitachi 's PRISM project is another SMR variant, a 600 megawatt sodium-cooled reactor that could be built at Sellafied. "PRISM plants could meet all of the UK energy needs for the next 100 years," says Hitachi.

Britain's Moltex aims to slash costs with a molten-salt design that uses a convection process, cutting corrosion and overcoming the sorts of metallurgy problems that have bedeviled past ventures. It too could in principle use up Sellafield's waste.

"It is a fantastic fit for Britain. It solves so many problems, and it is so much cheaper. We think that the levelized cost of electricity would be £40 a megawatt/hour once we get to the second and third reactors," said Dr Scott. Hinkley's inflation-linked tariff is already above £100 per MwH.

The Government announced an "ambitious" £250m competition in 2015 to identify the SMR reactors offering best value, but the scheme has stalled. "Every deadline has been missed," said Dr Scott.

"It is seen as a George Osborne project and since he left there has been absolutely no progress. Sadly we no longer think we're going to get anywhere with the British government, so we are looking at Canada where we have been welcomed with open arms," he said.

The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee issued its own rebuke in a report this month: 'Nuclear research and technology: Breaking the cycle of indecision'.

"Not keeping to the stated timetable for the SMR competition has had a negative effect on the nuclear sector in the UK. The Government should publish its techno-economic assessment of SMR's immediately," it said.

The report said public funding for nuclear research and development has dried up. It is a tiny fraction of what is spent in the US, France, or Japan. Policy is prone to drift and muddle.

"The undoubted potential of the civil nuclear sector has been blighted by the indecision of successive governments. We have reached a critical moment for the future of the UK as a serious nuclear nation".

The Euratom crisis may prove a blessing if it forces Britain to act. No country has greater need of this new 'plutonium-eating' technology.

Whether or not the Government is willing to grasp the chance of a British atomic revival - with cheap, clean, and safe nuclear power fit for the 21st Century - is almost a litmus test of Theresa May's industrial strategy.