By Geoffrey Lean and Richard Lloyd Parry

20 February 2000

Sellafield sent nuclear fuel with fabricated safety data to Germany as well as to Japan it emerged yesterday. The disclosure - which is likely to raise considerable concern in both the German and British governments - could deliver the final blow to the controversial Cumbrian nuclear complex.

Japan, Sellafield's largest customer, is already refusing to take any more fuel from the plant after The Independent revealed last year that it had been sent fuel with falsified safety records.

Now Germany, its second biggest customer, may follow suit. This would deprive the plant of almost all its sales of mixed oxide (mox) nuclear fuel and destroy the rationale for its main business, nuclear reprocessing.

The Green Party, the junior partner in Germany's coalition government, is already pressing for the country to stop doing business with Sellafield and key members said last night that this admission would considerably strengthen its hand.

The admission follows publication on Friday of three safety reports by the official Nuclear Installations Inspectorate. They revealed an extraordinary catalogue of "systematic management failure" at BNFL - and both the inspectorate and energy minister Helen Liddell have given the firm two months to put its house in order or face possible closure of the plant.

The report also revealed that workers at the plant had falsified safety checks on at least 31 "lots" - each containing some 4,000 pellets of mixed plutonium and uranium fuel. Though BNFL initially denied that any of this fuel had left the plant, the inspectorate concluded that eight assemblies made of it have been sent to Japan. The report mentioned, almost in passing, that one example of falsification as long ago as 1996 had been found, when fuel with forged safety data was sent to Germany.

BNFL insists the fuel was safe. A BNFL spokesman said: "That fuel has been in a German reactor for three years and performed perfectly well."

If Japan and Germany pull out, BNFL's sales of mox fuel - and a new plant it has constructed to make it - will be doomed. And the rationale of its main business, reprocessing used nuclear fuel, will disappear.

Dr Patrick Green, energy campaigner for Friends of the Earth, said: "This looks like being the final nail in the coffin of BNFL's plutonium business."

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