The Attorney-General's Office is studying the legal implications of this morning's decision to allow the expansion of the Sellafield nuclear waste retreatment plant.
In a 90-page ruling, the Hamburg-based International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea rejected the Government’s attempt to stop the commissioning of the MOX plant in Cumbria.
In its ruling, the Tribunal has allowed the British government to go-ahead with the production of MOX at the plant under condition that it provides detailed plans on how it intends to monitor the risks and effects of the operation on the environment.
The British government must also provide by December 17th a list of measures it will take to prevent pollution of the Irish sea.
The case at the tribunal, which lasted three days and began on November 19th was taken by the Attorney General Mr Michael McDowell to try and prevent the MOX fuel-production plant at Sellafield from starting work later this month.
In October, the British government gave the the go-ahead to open the plant because it said the economic case for opening outweighed social and environmental disadvantages.
Legal representatives of the Government said the reopening of the plant constitutes a contravention by Britain of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. They were seeking to stop international movements of radioactive materials associated with the MOX plant in and around the Irish Sea.
The State had also asked the Hamburg-based tribunal to order an immediate suspension of the MOX plant's authorisation and international transport, pending a decision from an international arbitration tribunal it wants set up to resolve the dispute.
The plant is designed to mix plutonium with uranium oxides to form a nuclear fuel to be burnt in reactors.
Both countries will bear their own costs.