"Shellshocked and knackered" was how a weary official from British Nuclear
Fuels (BNFL) summed up how he felt at the end of one of the worst weeks in
the organisation's 30-year history. The state-owned company is fighting for
its life, senior executives admit.
The scandal over the faking of safety checks on plutonium fuel rods, which
had already upset BNFL's biggest foreign customer, Japan, has caused Germany
to shut down a nuclear plant and demand compensation from the company. There
are now also fears that fuel rods sent to Switzerland may not have been
properly checked.
BNFL was also the target of a series of scathing attacks by Scandinavia and
Ireland, both of whom are worried about radioactive pollution. Iceland's
foreign minister warned Foreign Secretary Robin Cook yesterday that his
country's livelihood is under threat from the site, and that the UK's
commitment to reducing discharges from Sellafield to zero in the next 20
years was inadequate.
As if that were not enough, the company was criticised by an American couple
on a visit from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for planning to build a plutonium
incinerator in their area.
The main scandal centres on a pilot plant for making mixed plutonium and
uranium oxide fuel (MOX) at Sellafield in Cumbria. A report by the
government watchdog, the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate, said that a
"systematic management failure" had allowed workers to falsify measurements
of the diameter of hundreds of pellets of MOX fuel.
A report by BNFL also disclosed that two MOX fuel rods made for Japan had
been contaminated with "miscellaneous solid debris". Deliberate sabotage by
workers was suspected, but never proved. Following a Japanese ban on using
MOX fuel from Sellafield, the German power company, Preussen Elektra, closed
its power station at Unterwesser near the Dutch border in order to remove
the fuel rods made by BNFL. It announced that it was seeking compensation
for a falsified safety check on the fuel four years ago.
On Friday the Swiss power company, NOK, announced that it was sending a team
to Sellafield to check that 24 MOX fuel rods made for its Beznau nuclear
plant between 1994 and 1998 were safe. The company said it had no evidence
that data on its fuel rods had been falsified, but it wanted to check.
Greenpeace claimed that the full extent of the scandal had not yet been
exposed. "BNFL's crisis is far from over," said the group's Shaun Burnie.
"The sooner they and the government realise this and shut down plutonium
operations at Sellafield, the better." BNFL, which also runs a nuclear
power station and military tritium production plant at Chapelcross near
Annan, has apologised to its Japanese and German customers.
It has also sacked five workers, disciplined another five and shut down the
Mox plant while its quality control procedures are improved. The company's
commercial director, Jeremy Rycroft, hopes BNFL can save Sellafield but
admits it is the most difficult situation that he has faced.
