Second blow to BNFL with false data discovery at German firm

Source: The Guardian Publication date: Feb 23, 2000

A German nuclear company was `surprised and angry' yesterday to discover that documents accompanying fuel supplied by British Nuclear Fuels more than three years ago had been falsified.

Officials at the company will decide today whether to shut down a nuclear plant the size of Sizewell B. Sources at BNFL admitted last night the questionable fuel - up to 4,000 pellets of reprocessed mixed oxide - had been inside the German reactor since 1996.

This is another severe blow for the UK company, which has already lost its biggest customer in Japan by supplying fuel with falsified documents. Germany is its other main potential market.

This second example of falsified data underlines the lax plant's management, which was heavily criticised by the nuclear installations inspectorate in reports last Friday.

A spokeswoman for the German company, Preussen Elektra, which runs the power station at Unterweser near the Dutch border, said: `BNFL had always assured us that there was no indication of falsified safety documents. We are utterly astonished."

A decision on whether to shut down the plant for checks will be made at a meeting in Hanover of representatives of the national and regional environment ministries.

The Unterweser plant, a boiling water reactor, generates up to 1,255 megawatts of electricity. The discovery that questionable fuel has been in a German reactor for more than three years is immensely embarrassing to BNFL and the German nuclear industry.

BNFL said yesterday that workers at the mixed oxide plant had measured the batch of pellets as required, but the computer had crashed and data was lost. They then falsified the data, copying from a previous batch. The fuel was then made into rods, delivered to the German company and placed in the reactor. BNFL said that this was an isolated example. The Japanese falsification had happened later, when workers had routinely falsified papers rather than check samples by hand. But the discovery that BNFL had also sent false papers on plutonium fuel pellets to Germany poses a further clear threat to its commercial relationship. It must set back further the company's prospects for partial privatisation.

BNFL has to justify the commercial prospects for its new pounds 300m mixed oxide plant to the government before it can get a licence to run it - a task which looks virtually impossible since there are no customers.

The revelation comes at an awkward moment for the German power utilities. Gerhard Schroder's government, which includes the Greens, is committed to a phased withdrawal from nuclear energy.

BNFL has now been given two months by the nuclear installations inspectorate to come up with management plans to improve safety or face having some of its operations shut down.

Publication date: Feb 23, 2000 ) 2000, NewsReal, Inc.

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-- Carl Jenkins (Somewherepress@aol.com), February 24, 2000