Nuke Cleanup Firm Takes Criticism

First, there were the pigeons: hundreds that spent part of their day feeding in the garden of a rural English cottage, and part of their day brooding atop radiation-contaminated buildings at British Nuclear Fuel Ltd.’s Sellafield complex a few miles away.

The garden was found to be so contaminated that workers in protective suits had to come in, wring the necks of 700 radioactive pigeons and dispose of them as low-level nuclear waste. Two official review committees in June accused BNFL of mismanagement in allowing the spread of nuclear contaminants to residential areas nearby.

Then, last month, the British government’s nuclear oversight agency found that BNFL workers had deliberately falsified quality control data on nuclear fuel shipped to overseas markets, a breach the agency said reflected BNFL’s inadequate “safety culture.” Germany, Japan and Switzerland announced they would no longer accept BNFL fuels.

Much of this would be distant, if sobering, news if BNFL were not the company the U.S. government is relying on most heavily to clean up America’s nuclear weapons mess. The company holds nearly $9 billion in U.S. contracts for some of the most technologically challenging environmental cleanup tasks in the nation--contracts that public interest groups are now demanding be canceled because of the revelations.

“Here in the United States, they’re going to be handling the most dangerous materials known to man. And the fact is, the problems they have in England come down to a lack of a safety culture and a lack of integrity on the part of their operators,” said Tom Carpenter of the Government Accountability Project, one of 22 public interest and anti-nuclear groups that are filing a petition today with the Department of Energy to bar BNFL from U.S. nuclear cleanup contracts.

Richardson Orders Review of Operations

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson on Wednesday ordered a “top-to-bottom review” of BNFL’s operations at five DOE sites that will look at the company’s management and safety record in the U.S. and Britain.

“In light of recent events overseas, we are putting BNFL under extra scrutiny . . . to be sure that the problems uncovered at Sellafield don’t exist at DOE sites,” a department statement said.

The company, whose chief executive resigned in the wake of the revelations, said it has overhauled its British operations to prevent future errors but said the fuel delivered was never unsafe.

“The issue of what’s going on in the U.K. is a very important and troubling matter. . . . We had some systems at one of our sites that aren’t as comprehensive or as far-reaching or as stringent as they should have been. But most of those related to quality control programs, not safety programs,” said David Campbell, manager of external corporate affairs for BNFL’s U.S. subsidiary.

Company Inherits Westinghouse Projects

BNFL, wholly owned by the British government but scheduled for partial privatization, is one of the leading companies in the world in nuclear waste reprocessing and plant decommissioning. With its recent acquisition of Westinghouse Electric Co.’s nuclear operations, it has become one of the biggest British employers in the U.S.

And it is one of the most important linchpins in the DOE’s decades-long plan to clean up hundreds of millions of gallons of radioactive waste, the legacy of half a century of nuclear weapons production across the U.S.

BNFL in August is scheduled for a final award of a $6.9-billion contract for cleanup of extremely hazardous tank wastes at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state that are threatening the Columbia River. It is set to sign a $1.2-billion contract for construction of a mixed-waste processing facility in Idaho, a project that includes a plutonium incinerator that opponents fear could threaten nearby Yellowstone National Park with airborne contaminants.

At the DOE’s Oak Ridge site in Tennessee, BNFL has a $238-million contract to decontaminate and decommission three gaseous diffusion plant buildings. The company is doing $110 million a year in solid waste disposal, processing and shipping at the Savannah River, S.C., site and is a cleanup partner at DOE sites in Colorado, New York and New Mexico as well.

Cleanup work is already running years behind schedule at places such as Hanford, and doubts about the only contractor geared up to do the work could present a devastating setback.

Indeed, BNFL officials said the controversy over the falsified data comes just as the company is attempting to secure billions of dollars in financing to commence construction of a high-tech plant at Hanford to convert waste from underground tanks into glass logs. Under the contract, BNFL stands to make a $1.9-billion profit over 20 years, and the U.S. government agrees to pay off its construction loans if it defaults.

“It’s terrible timing, and it’s fair to say that the environmentalists and these public interest groups who have been on a rather rabid campaign have done an excellent job of creating an environment that’s difficult to proceed in,” Campbell said.

The fact that federal officials appear bound to stick with BNFL or risk years of delays is the agency’s own doing, the result of failing to invest in alternative technologies at a time when BNFL’s own technologies are less than proven, critics said.

“If DOE is between a rock and a hard place, it has worked extremely hard to get itself there,” said Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, who believes the $7-billion plan to vitrify just 10% of the tank wastes at Hanford is not likely to work as conceived.

In their petition to bar BNFL from federal contracts, public interest groups raised questions about the firm’s growing importance in cleanup of the DOE weapons complex and in the U.S. commercial nuclear power industry.

“Is it advisable to have a foreign-government-owned company assume a monopoly role in DOE’s cleanup program?” the petition asked. Moreover, the petitioners cited BNFL’s “disastrous environmental performance,” which includes a history of radioactive discharges into the Irish Sea.

In addition to the pigeons so contaminated they qualified as nuclear waste, the petition cites a British Department of Health study published in 1997 that found large numbers of children throughout England, Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland contaminated with plutonium in quantities “inversely proportional to the distance from which the children lived from BNFL’s Sellafield plant.”

BNFL Fined After 1997 Guilty Plea

The company was fined more than $32,000 in 1997 after pleading guilty to violating Britain’s Radioactive Substances Act. The court cited BNFL’s “total disregard” of recommendations for “urgent remedial action” of a 328-foot bridge carrying radioactive discharge from the Sellafield plant to the Irish Sea.

The conduct under scrutiny in the most recent government report involved BNFL’s nuclear fuel reprocessing, a technology not in use in the U.S. It involves taking spent fuel and separating reusable uranium and plutonium from waste products. Although the size of the fuel pellets produced under the process is measured automatically, manual measurements are required as a backup. British government investigators documented that BNFL workers had falsified those measurements on at least 22 lots of fuel because taking the actual measurements was too tedious.