Question

To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, pursuant to the written statement of 3 July 2014, Official Report, column 61WS, on management of overseas owned plutonium in the UK, whether the plutonium from Germany and Sweden respectively allocated to the UK civilian stockpile will be subject to the withdrawal from safeguards option under article 14 of the tripartite UK-Euratom-IAEA Voluntary Safeguards Agreement of 1977.

All civil nuclear material in the UK is subject to Euratom safeguards and the terms of the UK/Euratom/IAEA Voluntary Safeguards Agreement, including its Article 14. As part of the 1998 Strategic Defence Review, the Government announced that as a matter of policy future withdrawals of nuclear material from safeguards would be severely limited, and that the quantities of material involved would be orders of magnitude less than the amounts used to make nuclear weapons. There is no intention to withdraw from safeguards the plutonium recently allocated to the UK by Germany and Sweden. Information on nuclear material withdrawn from safeguards is available on the Office for Nuclear Regulation website at:

www.onr.org.uk/safeguards/withdrawals.htm