If the EU export raw materials to the UK without agreement they are breaching Euratom. It's not there for comedy value. There's no 'quid pro quo' to be had, a comprehensive agreement has to be struck.
The alternative is we just walk off and the UK AEA see 2/3rds of their turnover disappear. We aren't reprocessing for free. Good plan.
Incidentally, we refuse to take their waste they can always send it to the
La Hague site instead - it has 200 tonnes of capacity per year free apparently, then the plutonium to
Marcoule.
Quote:
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La Hague has nearly half of the world's light water reactor spent nuclear fuel reprocessing capacity. It has been in operation since 1976, and has a capacity of about 1700 tonnes per year. It extracts plutonium which is then recycled into MOX fuel at the Marcoule site.
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So, yeah, that's probably what'd be done with at least some of the waste. We don't have a monopoly on reprocessing in Euratom.