UP to 1,600 jobs are to be lost across a dozen Magnox nuclear power sites by September next year, the company revealed yesterday.

Eleven plants have already shut down and the last still in operation, Wylfa on Anglesey in North Wales, is due to close its doors at the end of the year.

The company said decommissioning the sites was always going to lead to a reduction in staffing levels.

Following a review of the closure programme, Magnox said it expected between 1,400 and 1,600 job losses up to September 2016, including staff, agency and contract workers.

“These proposed reductions arise from planned stepdowns in the work programme at a number of sites and the implementation of a more streamlined operating model for delivering decommissioning.

“We will seek wherever possible for these reductions to be through voluntary means and we will endeavour to retrain staff in roles where we are currently reliant on agency resources.”

Unions including Unite, GMB and Prospect expressed “shock” at the scale of the losses and will campaign for no compulsory redundancies.