The Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM), has said that the consensus between the nuclear industry, green groups and local authorities on what to do with waste may collapse.

Gordon MacKerron, the committee's chairman, said yesterday that the failure to deal with nuclear waste made people reluctant to support new stations until a solution had been found.

He said they were close to achieving this but if solving the waste problem meant opening the door to a new generation of nuclear stations then: "We fear a large number of those involved in finding a solution would simply walk away. It would make our job far more difficult."

Although the government has not discussed the issue officially, the industry is calling for 10 stations to replace the existing ones which are closing.

By 2020 the 20% of electricity currently produced by nuclear stations will have shrunk to 7%.

Professor MacKerron said that the extra waste would add another "half an Albert Hall full" to the pile but a big percentage would be in the form of spent fuel from the decommsioned stations, which would require a lot of new flasks to store it.

The committee has spent two years narrowing down the options for disposing of waste from 15 to four and will come up with a proposed solution by June next year.

Rumours before the election that Tony Blair was to announce a new generation of nuclear stations as soon as he got back into government led Prof MacKerron to fire off a letter pointing out the dangers to the programme of dealing with nuclear waste.

Yesterday another threat to CoRWM's programme emerged when a second nuclear waste agency, Nirex, threatened to publish a long secret list of 12 places which might be suitable for the national nuclear waste dump.

Nirex, which used to be owned by the nuclear industry, and spent 15 years unsuccessfully trying to find a site to bury waste found 500 potentially suitable sites and drew up a shortlist of 12. This was in 1989 but neither list was ever published.

Last month Nirex was made an independent agency with the job of advising the nuclear industry of how to package its waste for disposal or storage once a solution had been found on how to dispose of waste. It has called local authorities and environment groups to a meeting with the idea of publishing the lists, which would almost certainly lead to the formation of groups opposed to nuclear dumping at each location named.

Prof MacKerron said: "It seems to be an odd decision to publish lists that are 15 years old that cannot be relevant to what is happening now.

"It is nothing to do with us and we have not been consulted but as far as we are concerned it would not be helpful because it would get people very excited. What we need is a calm discussion about how to solve this problem."

The four options CoRWM is discussing are variations of long-term storage or disposal of the waste in the UK either above ground or in deep depositories.

Other options like firing it at the sun, burying it in ice caps or oceans have been discounted.

One of the problems with long-term storage is that it is not a final solution. Some of the less dangerous waste, like the rubble from demolished power stations could be buried or stored on site until the radioactivity had decayed.