"They will be taking the decision on the recommendations on Thursday morning," a spokesman told Reuters. "It will then go for one final round of consultations. But we don't expect any rabbits to be pulled from hats."

The report will come the day after the 20th anniversary of the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine that spewed radioactive dust across much of northern Europe.

CoRWM has been working for two years assessing how best to deal with high and intermediate level waste from Britain's civil nuclear programme that remains toxic for thousands of years.

It will be eagerly awaited by the government as it decides whether to go ahead with a new generation of nuclear power plants to plug the country's looming electricity gap as it has to shut down many of the ageing nuclear and coal-fired stations.

A report by the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in 2001 put the total volume from all sources of nuclear waste in Britain at 1.75 million cubic metres.

But CoRWM said this would rise sharply as all but one of the country's ageing nuclear power plants were closed, dismantled and disposed of over the next decade.

In August last year CoRWM cut down its initial long list of waste disposal options to just four: long-term interim storage, deep geological disposal, phased deep geological disposal and near-surface disposal.

It comes down to deciding whether to bury the waste but make some or all of it accessible for future generations as technology advances, or and put it forever beyond reach.

The CoRWM meeting, which starts on Tuesday and ends on Thursday, will whittle this down to one preferred option or combination of options to satisfy the key criteria of security, risks to health and the environment and costs.

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, set up in 2005 to oversee the dismantling of Britain's old nuclear power stations, calculated this year that the cleanup costs of all the civil nuclear sites would be up to 70 billion pounds (US$125 billion).