British Nuclear Fuels Ltd has said it will resist international pressure to suspend operations at its Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in Cumbria. Its statement follows a move by Iceland and Denmark to raise the plant's discharges at the OSPAR meeting next week in Copenhagen.
The Scandinavian countries will seek to invoke international treaty requirements on radiation emissions and has joined Ireland in opposition to Sellafield.
A company spokesman defended the plant, saying that its discharges had fallen a thousand-fold over the past 25 years and were now "trivially small".