A nuke by any other name

Name changes are 10 a penny. Royal Mail to Consignia and back again. Bowater to Rexam. Department of Social Security to Department for Work and Pensions.

But rarely has an organisation changed its name before it comes into existence. That is what is happening to the Legacies Management Authority, the new £50bn government body charged with cleaning up the mess created by 50 years of nuclear power, nuclear weapons and nuclear submarines.

The Bill creating it does not come before Parliament until June, yet the LMA has already become the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA).

The original name was chosen by civil servants at the Department of Trade and Indus- try, who hadn't wanted to use the word "nuclear" because of the bad publicity surrounding British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL).

However, after publishing a White Paper on the LMA last year, the officials had a change of heart. Nuclear was OK, even though it seems to have been snubbed in last week's Energy White Paper.

Still, the civil servants behind the LMA have not entirely given up. The NDA will be run though a group called the Legacies Management Unit or LMU.