BNFL's Savannah clean-up slated

A massive nuclear clean-up operation in the US, run by a subsidiary of BNFL, has been slammed by inspectors for having poor safety management and cost control.

Westinghouse Government Services, in which the nationalised nuclear fuels group has a 40 per cent stake, was criticised in a report into its $600m (£380m) contract to clean up an old nuclear bomb factory at Savannah River in South Carolina.

Inspectors from the US Department of Energy found that WGS had an "inadequate and ineffective" approach to "risk prioritisation" when dealing with safety and a "limited probability of success" in managing costs.

The DofE made a site visit during the summer and found that WGS avoided difficult and expensive work, such as building decommissioning and stabilising nuclear material, "weighs business elements more heavily (by a factor of three) than risk elements" and had a system that did not differentiate between small and large accidents.

Other reports by the nuclear watchdogs exposed unsafe storage of 22,000 tonnes of depleted uranium managed by Westinghouse at Savannah River. It is stored in drums, cardboard and wooden boxes inside "corroded" buildings on timbers that have "rotted and failed".

The criticism, published on the DofE's official website, comes only weeks after managers at Savannah were accused of racism for giving black workers more dangerous jobs than white workers.

It also comes at an embarrassing time for BNFL, as the draft Bill to set up a £48bn agency to sort out Britain's nuclear legacy was highlighted in the Queen's Speech last week. BNFL is expected to be central to this clean-up.

BNFL said it was not the lead contractor on the Savannah River project and referred all calls to Washington Group, its partner, which was not available for comment.