Nuclear U-turn

British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), the state owned British company responsible for Sellafield and numerous other nuclear power plants and facilities, broke new ground this week with the announcement that it is entering the nuclear clean-up business.

Having polluted Britain and Ireland for decades, BNFL now wants to take advantage of what it believes is a growing worldwide nuclear clean-up market worth £3 billion annually.

Their main rival for this business created by their own polluting activities is the US multinational company Bechtel, which is also heavily involved in Iraqi reconstruction contracts.

BNFL will now be paid to clean up their own decaying nuclear facilities, many of which have to be shut down over the next decade. BNFL already has contracts for cleaning up part of the Chernobyl projects.

However, all is not going as smoothly as BNFL would like, and it seems that in this new business venture their old failings are recurring. Contracts won in the US to clean up nuclear waste in Tennessee and decommission redundant nuclear bomb triggers in Idaho have both run into cost overruns.

Now the British Government is trying to get US authorities to cover the extra costs. It seems that some things never change for BNFL.