Europe’s most heavily contaminated industrial site is to host a new nuclear power station, after the Government announced the £70 million sale of land at Sellafield.

The 190-hectare plot, next to the main site in West Cumbria where Britain mastered the technology to build the atomic bomb in the 1950s, was bought yesterday by a consortium of French, Spanish and British companies.

The group, which includes Scottish & Southern Energy (SSE), Iberdrola, of Spain, and GdF Suez, of France, said that it planned to use the site to build a new nuclear power station with a capacity to produce up to 3.6 gigawatts — enough to provide the power needs of Glasgow, Leeds and Cardiff combined — with construction due to start in 2015.

The news was welcomed by unions and the local community, which has waged a vigorous campaign for a new nuclear plant at Sellafield, where the world’s first commercial nuclear power plant was opened by the Queen in 1956. The Calder Hall plant continued to operate until 2003.

Jamie Reed, MP for Copeland, said: “This is a landmark announcement — the most important for our part of the world for decades.

“It confirms West Cumbria’s place at the very heart of the UK nuclear industry and we can now look forward with optimism to the future we have worked so hard to create.”

John Clarke, the commercial director of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), said that the cash raised from the sale would be used to pay for the nuclear clean-up operation that is under way at Sellafield, which employs about 10,000 people, and at other NDA-owned sites.

The consortium will pay £19.5 million up front to the NDA, a government body, followed by a further payment of at least £50.5 million in the next six years.

Mike Graham, the national secretary at Prospect, the union that represents 15,000 nuclear workers, said: “It is great news for the people of West Cumbria and their future employment prospects, providing work building and operating the plants for at least three generations.”

However, Ben Ayliffe, the head of Greenpeace’s nuclear campaign, said: “Sellafield is a byword for monumental nuclear incompetence, so it’s rather apt that someone thinks they can build another nuclear facility here, given the industry’s track record of not getting things done remotely on time or to budget.”

According to Halcrow, the engineering group, the sale price for the site was at the low end of initial estimates.

This year, the NDA sold two other sites earmarked for new nuclear stations — at Oldbury-on-Severn, in Gloucestershire, and Wylfa, on Anglesey — to E.ON and RWE, of Germany, raising more than £380 million.

EDF, the French state-controlled company, is planning to build four new reactors, at Hinkley Point, in Somerset, and Sizewell, in Suffolk.

A new Sellafield plant was considered less attractive because of the high levels of contamination in the area and because it is a long way from centres of electricity demand. A new transmission link will need to be built through the Lake District to connect the new plant to the National Grid.

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