Nuclear directors get bonus

Directors of Britain's publicly owned nuclear waste firm have been awarded "performance-related bonuses" despite presiding over one of the industry's greatest disasters, the Independent on Sunday can reveal.

The chairman and two executive directors of UK Nirex - which this year was refused permission to build a nuclear waste site and has since sacked more than a third of its staff - have been paid a total of pounds 51,000 in bonuses.

The report of the public inquiry into the proposal was harshly critical of the firm's performance, and its failure to get the go-ahead is thought to have put the search for a British nuclear dump back a generation.

The planned pounds 195m laboratory was designed to test the suitability of a pounds 1.8bn dump for 275,000 cubic metres of nuclear waste at Longlands Farm, Gosforth in Cumbria. Objectors, like Friends of the Earth, argue that spending time and money on the laboratory would end up creating an unstoppable momentum for the establishment of the dump itself.

Reports by the Government's own pollution inspectors concluded that radioactive contamination - which remains deadly for a quarter of a million years - would rise to the surface, and permission was denied. Nirex reacted by trying to stop the inspectorate's work and suppressing the reports.

Tony Juniper, campaigns director of Friends of the Earth, says that the chief executive Michael Folger's bonus (pounds 28,000) alone "significantly exceeded" the entire annual salary of the Friends' young campaigner, Dr Rachel Western, whose work almost single-handedly defeated the company at the inquiry.

UK Nirex said last week that the directors have received their bonuses for "the achievement of a number of objectives". But senior government sources yesterday said privately that a pay cut would have been more appropriate