28 June 2006
Britain's most notorious nuclear company is in its death throes. British Nuclear Fuels, known for decades as BNFL, is to be terminated, according to one of its veteran managers.
Roger Coates, former head of health and safety at BNFL, predicts that the state-owned company will be wound up as a result of a major government reorganisation. This will be "the end of an era", he says.
Since 1971, BNFL has been responsible for the controversial Sellafield nuclear complex in Cumbria, a role which often seemed to get the company into trouble. After a local beach was contaminated with radioactivity in 1983, BNFL was prosecuted and fined £10,000 for breaking the nuclear safety laws.
In 2000, the company's chief executive, John Taylor, resigned in the wake of a scandal in which the safety records of a plutonium fuel plant were falsified. And earlier this month BNFL's subsidiary, British Nuclear Group, pled guilty to breaching safety rules by allowing acid containing 160 kilos of plutonium to leak from a ruptured pipe.
BNFL has also been responsible for the UK's 11 first-generation nuclear power stations, as well as a fuel fabrication plant at Springfields near Preston and a uranium enrichment plant at Capenhurst near Chester.
But in April 2005 BNFL was radically restructured in order to work with the government's new Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. According to Coates, BNFL is now a small holding company with only a "few tens" of employees. Its shares are still held by the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, currently Alistair Darling.
BNFL's former sites, including Sellafield, have all been passed onto the British Nuclear Group and other companies, working under contract to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. At the moment, BNFL still owns the US-based reactor design company, Westinghouse, and a research company called Nexia Solutions.
But there are more changes to come, according to an article by Coates in the June newsletter (pdf) of the Society for Radiological Protection, a professional association for radiation scientists. "The overall shape of the organisation is continuing to evolve rapidly," he writes.
He points out that Westinghouse is in the final stages of being sold to the Japanese company, Toshiba, and the government is planning to sell off the British Nuclear Group within the next 18 months or so. "On completion of the sale processes it seems likely that alternative parenting will be arranged for Nexia, and then BNFL will probably be wound up," he says.
The reaction of Jean McSorley, a long-time adversary of BNFL who leads Greenpeace's anti-nuclear campaign in the UK, was brief and to the point. "Hurrah!" she said.
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