Oliver Morgan Sunday February 20, 2000

Inspectors have uncovered 'extremely serious' management flaws at a second atomic plant run by British Nuclear Fuels. The errors resulted in the inaccurate recording of radioactive discharges at Hinkley Point, the nuclear power station on the Bristol Channel.

The revelation follows the publication of three highly critical Government reports that highlight failures of control at the company's Sellafield complex in Cumbria.

The new report - by an inspector from the Environment Agency - suggests BNFL is beset by management problems. The inspector told The Observer his investigations found an 'extremely serious' situation, which 'cuts at the very foundation of the method of regulation'.

He said these indicated failures were not limited to Sellafield, an observation that will raise worrying concerns about the culture of management throughout the company, which owns eight operational first-generation Magnox power stations, along with the Sellafield site and other operations.

The problems at Hinkley Point concern carbon-14 emissions between December 1997 and December 1999. Only half the real emissions of the isotope were recorded by staff, it now appears.

The Environment Agency inspector, Jim Pagington, said a BNFL employee had noted high levels of emissions and assumed his figures were distorted by the presence of another radioactive substance, sulphur-35.

He then calculated how much sulphur-35 he thought was present, and subtracted it from the total. This was significant enough to alter the annual total, and reduce it by 50 per cent.

'A member of staff thought that because the carbon-14 discharges were high, the sampling system was not working,' Pagington told The Observer . 'He thought the sulphur-35 was being carried over with carbon-14, so he subtracted one figure from another. He was wrong.'

Pagington stressed, however, that the emissions did not breach the agency's limit for C14 emissions. 'The most serious thing about this is that it is a breach of company procedure,' he said.

'It shows the management processes are failing and seems to indicate it is not just a problem in one place. We take it extremely seriously. It cuts at the very foundation of regulation.'

He had not yet decided if the misrecording amounted to deliberate falsification, but did not rule that out as a possibility.

Last week the Environment Agency issued an enforcement notice on a BNFL subsidiary, Magnox Electric, which operates Hinkley A, requiring the company to re-examine the samples concerned and revise its monitoring procedures. Hinkley Point A's two reactors are currently shut down following separate safety concerns.

Patrick van den Bulck of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament said: 'With these revelations following hard on the heels of the Sellafield data falsification scandal, it would seem that fabricating records is endemic within BNFL.'

Several damning reports about BNFL were issued by the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate last week. Three major problems at the company were highlighted: lack of high-quality safety management, lack of resources to carry out existing safety management and lack of independent inspection.

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