Ministers dismissed Sellafield terror risks

Ministers carried out only a cursory examination of the terrorist threat to a controversial new nuclear fuel plant at Sellafield before giving it the go-ahead, the Independent on Sunday can reveal.

They have relied overwhelmingly, since the attack on the World Trade Centre, on "informal" advice from civil servants from the branch of Government which owns British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), the nationalised industry that runs the controversial Cumbrian nuclear complex.

This advice – that the risk of putting enough plutonium to make hundreds of terrorist nuclear bombs a year into public circulation is "negligible" – mirrors BNFL's own position, but flies in the face of the great majority of expert opinion. The revelation will further anger the Irish government which last week undertook to "exploit every legal avenue" to try to stop the new mixed-oxide (MOX) plant from starting up. Mr Joe Jacob, the country's Energy minister, said that he found Britain's decision "incomprehensible" at a time when governments should be tightening security over nuclear facilities.

The decision – exclusively forecast in the Independent on Sunday three weeks ago – would allow BNFL to start operating the plant, which will make new nuclear fuel from mixing plutonium and uranium, and to ship it around the world. It was rammed through by Tony Blair, despite his recent warnings about the dangers of terrorists making nuclear bombs, against determined resistance from Michael Meacher, the Environment minister.

Upon publication of the Independent on Sunday's article highlighting the terrorist threat, ministers immediately asked for new information on the danger in the wake of the events of 11 September. But it was a hurried exercise, and ministers relied heavily on the view of the little known Office for Civilian Nuclear Security, which dismissed the threat. The Office is presented as an "independent body", but the Department of Trade and Industry, BNFL's sole shareholder, admitted last week that it financed it and staffed it with civil servants.

The Department said that the Office had only given "informal advice" to ministers on the issue, rather than presenting a full submission. It refused to reveal for how long the Office had considered the issue, on the grounds that there was "a great deal of sensitivity over this", but it is understood that the process took a few days, at most.

The Office's advice is identical to the view of BNFL, which went out of its way last week to insist that it would be extremely difficult for terrorists, who intercepted a shipment of the fuel, to extract plutonium from it for bombs. But the Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific body, reported three years ago that this could be done "relatively easily", and a report by the US Government's Office of Arms Control and Nonproliferation used the same words.