SCIENTISTS at a Preston laboratory are breeding super-bugs to eat up nuclear waste.

They hope the hungry micro-mites will munch away at tons of radioactive concrete - saving the nuclear industry millions of pounds every year.

Boffins at British Nuclear Fuels at Springfields have been working on the hush-hush project for two years. They hope their revolutionary - if somewhat wacky - idea will solve the nuclear industry's biggest headache - how to get rid of obsolete nuclear power stations.

Ten Magnox stations are to close within the next ten years and decontamination costs are expected to run into billions of pounds.

The idea is to reduce the huge amounts of nuclear waste which has to be stored when redundant power stations are broken up. High level radioactive waste has to be stored for 1,000 years.

Dr Jenny Benson, who is leading the research, said: "We have isolated the acid-producing bacteria which degrades the contaminated surface of the concrete. We want to encourage the microbes to do what they do naturally.

"We cannot say yet how long it would take to break down the concrete, it depends on the levels of radioactivity. Some heavily contaminated parts could take years."

She also hopes the bugs will cut the number of workers exposed to radiation.

And the giant American aircraft manufacturer Lockheed is so impressed with the super-bug, it has teamed up with BNFL to help speed up research. The company has also landed a £3M research grant for its pioneering inventions.

Scientists say the bugs will be quarantined along with the radioactive waste once they've done their job - sealed in lead tombs for 1,000 years!

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