A United Nations tribunal will rule on December 3rd on whether Ireland should be granted an injunction to prevent Britain opening a nuclear fuel processing unit at its Sellafield plant.
The Government is worried about pollution from the plant, which is located at the Sellafield facility in Cumbria, and which could discharge radioactive material into the Irish Sea.
The Hamburg-based International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea said in a statement this evening that the ruling would be issued on December 3rd at 10 a.m.
The Government made an application on November 19th for the tribunal to issue injunctions to prevent the start of operations at British Nuclear Fuels' (BNFL) 472 million pound mixed oxide (MOX) fuel plant, and to stop ships transporting nuclear material to and from it.
The Irish legal action is based on what it says are contraventions of the 1982 United Nations Law of the Sea Convention.
Britain has said the tribunal had no jurisdiction over the matter and any move to stop the Sellafield MOX Plant from opening would have costly economic consequences for state-owned BNFL.