A UN maritime court on Monday rejected a bid by Ireland to block British plans to expand operations at its Sellafield nuclear waste retreatment plant.
Last month, Ireland filed a motion before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in Hamburg to stop regulatory approval for a 470-million-pound (754-million-euro, 660-million-dollar) development at Sellafield on Britain's northwest coast, opposite Ireland.
Britain has given the go-ahead for a mixed plutonium and uranium oxide (MOX) plant to come onstream at Sellafield, which Ireland argues will increase the amount of radioactive pollution the plant pours into the Irish Sea and could be the target of a terrorist attack.
The court said it saw no urgent need for a ban but encouraged the two countries to seek a negotiated settlement to avoid environmental risks to the Irish Sea.
An international arbitration tribunal is to meet early next year to give a full hearing to Ireland's case under the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Both Britain and Ireland are signatories of the convention.
Ireland had hoped to win a temporary injunction to prevent the commissioning of the MOX plant until the arbitration tribunal gave its ruling. Britain has scheduled the start of operations for December 20.
The MOX plant, which was completed in 1996, has been marred since 1999 by financial concerns, court challenges and scandals that have effectively stalled the production schedule.
Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern has been pressing for the closure of the entire 1950s-era Sellafield complex and London's decision to expand it without consulting Dublin has angered ministers.
Ahern has described Sellafield as a "surviving dinosaur of a defunct military-industrial complex" and said it was the single most serious threat to the Irish environment.
The issue has been a point of contention between the two countries for decades.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Ahern clashed again over Sellafield last week during a meeting on the fringes of a British-Irish Council meeting.
Blair said that if there was a risk from Sellafield it would affect people in both Britain and Ireland.
"That is why it is important we abide by every single one of the standards that have been laid down. Which we do," he said.
Blair said the safety standards governing the plant were rigorous and warned that shutting down the plant would cost jobs in the region.
"Our difficulty is that if we end up in a situation where there will be a lot of people who will lose their jobs and it does not appear to be based on evidence or accordance with the standards that have been laid down, then you arise with a different type of problem."
Ahern described Britain's plan to commission a new MOX reprocessing plant at Sellafield as a "further agitation of what we believe are the difficulties, the major difficulties of nuclear waste" – Germany (AFP)
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