A REPORT published by Greenpeace yesterday claimed that Dounreay would be left with up to two million litres of foreign radioactive waste.
The Government and Dounreay have continually insisted that such waste would be returned to the country of origin.
The report claims that the size of the foreign contracts sought by Dounreay would mean up to 28,000 litres of waste, but because of the cementation process employed there would be an 85-fold increase in the volume of waste left at the Caithness plant.
The authors of the report, Dr Frank Barnaby, a nuclear physicist and former director of the Stockholm Peace Institute, and Mr Shaun Birnie, Greenpeace International's nuclear spokesman, were in Inverness yesterday to launch their report.
Mr Birnie explained their concerns over Dounreay's declared intention to seek contracts to reprocess at least 6000 of the near 15,000 spent fuel rods of US origin which are currently lying at research reactors around the world.
Mr Birnie read from Dounreay's own literature which stated that any foreign waste would be returned to country of origin ``or an equivalent in radioactivity terms''.
He said most of the countries looking to use Dounreay did not have facilities to store any waste and the US had made it clear that they might take the waste back from reprocessing. However, the US would not take waste that resulted from Dounreay's cementation process.
``The waste will remain at Dounreay because not only is the US unable to take the cemented waste in, none of the client states with the exception of Germany, have facilities and they won't get repositories in the 25 years that Dounreay puts as the maximum for keeping the waste.''
The UK Atomic Energy Authority's spokesman at Dounreay, Mr Ian Shepherd, insisted last night that the Greenpeace report contained misinformation.
``We are quite clear that the waste will be returned to the country of origin and that means returned from Dounreay. As regards the volumes produced, the report doesn't include any information or figures on the alternatives to reprocessing.''
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