IAEA to Inspect British Nuclear Site, Prime Minister Says - NTI

In accordance with the global effort to halt the proliferation of nuclear materials, the International Atomic Energy Agency will inspect a nuclear reprocessing facility in Cumbria, England, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Friday (see GSN, Feb. 18, 2005).

(Mar. 22) - British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, center, visits his country's Sellafield nuclear facility in 2009. Brown last week announced plans to permit international inspectors at the site (Anna Gowthorpe/Getty Images).

The United Kingdom will support U.S. President Barack Obama's goal of securing all vulnerable nuclear materials on the planet within four years, Brown said in a report by London's Guardian newspaper.
"In line with this we will invite the [international nuclear watchdog] to carry out a security inspection at Sellafield. We will make funds available for similar inspections in areas of greatest concern," the prime minister said.
London will also create a "center of nuclear excellence" from which the United Kingdom can "lead global efforts to secure the safe global expansion of civil nuclear power," he said.
Brown said he had reached an understanding with French President Nicolas Sarkozy on additional nuclear collaboration between the two nations, though he emphasized that France and the United Kingdom would continue to maintain their own individual nuclear arsenals.
"We have agreed [to] a degree of cooperation that is, I think, greater than we have had previously but we will retain, as will France, our independent nuclear deterrent," Brown said.
"We wish, of course, to see multilateral disarmament around the world and we are ready to contribute towards that, but in a world that is so insecure, particularly with other countries trying to acquire nuclear weapons, we do not see the case for us withdrawing the independent nuclear deterrent that we have," he said (Hélène Mulholland, London Guardian, March 19).
Meanwhile, the British Defense Ministry said today that a U.K. marine will be punished for earlier this month secretively transporting a woman in the trunk of his car into Faslane, a high-level security naval post, the Press Association Scotland reported.

The United Kingdom's Trident nuclear-armed submarines are deployed at the naval base, which is near Glasgow, Scotland (Lucy Christie, Press Association Scotland/London Independent, March 22).

 

Republished with permission from :
Global Security Newswire, Copyright, National Journal Group, Monday, March 22, 2010