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Friday, 25 February, 2000, 19:55 GMT

Sellafield crisis deepens

The UK Government has come under further pressure over the way the nuclear reprocessing plant at Sellafield is being run.

Five Scandanavian countries have expressed "grave concern" about the site's safety record after last week's revelations that false documentation had been supplied with fuel rods produced at the BNFL plant.

Foreign Secretary Robin Cook was told by his Icelandic counterpart on Friday that Iceland was concerned about discharges into the sea of low-level radioactivity from the plant.

In a separate issue, Americans from the Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free campaign were presenting a petition to BNFL at Sellafield in protest at the company's plans to build a nuclear waste incinerator not far from the Yellowstone National Park.

For years, Scandanavian countries and the Republic of Ireland have complained that the waste pipeline from Sellafield creates radioactive contamination that can be traced in shellfish - although only at low levels - in their own waters.

Icelandic concern

Concern has been heightened by last week's damning report by nuclear inspectors, which concluded that Sellafield did not have a proper safety culture.

Foreign Minister Halldor Asgrimsson, speaking in London after a meeting with Mr Cook, said his island nation lived off the ocean's resources and hoped the process of eliminating discharge could be speeded up. Martin O'Neill

"I am disappointed and I hope that everybody is disappointed. If it can be done in a shorter time we would be happy," he said.

Earlier he told BBC Radio Four's Today programme: "I think the British Government is also concerned about Sellafield. We would like to see it closed down - although that may not be very realistic."

Mr Cook said discharge from Sellafield was within international limits and was already being reduced and repeated a pledge that the discharge would be reduced to "almost zero" within two decades.

"We all share the wish to do it as quickly as possible but Sellafield is a major industrial undertaking and it is not helpful to anybody to promise we can take action that is unrealistic in its time frame," he said.

Also speaking to Today, the chairman of the Commons Trade and Industry Select Committee, Martin O'Neill, said: "The concerns of the Icelanders are well known and they are quite right in their expressions of concern of how things have been handled at Sellafield.

"But I don't think closure in the short term is realistic or that their increased concern is necessarily justified on the basis that last week's quality control falsifications are necessarily going to make things that much worse."

False records

Problems were highlighted at a new Sellafield factory producing batches of uranium and plutonium mixed-oxide (Mox) fuel rods.

It was discovered that the sampling of rods was not carried out and records that showed it had been were copied from previous checks.

In the wake of the report, Germany's Green Environment Minister, Juergen Trittin, said he was reviewing whether to terminate the country's reprocessing contracts with Sellafield.

On Thursday it emerged that a German plant had shut down so fuel rods supplied by BNFL could be removed.

The government in Berlin is deeply worried by what it has termed a systematic neglect of safety standards at the British plant.

Five workers have so far been dismissed over the scandal at Sellafield - three in October and two more last week.

Related to this story:
Nuclear plant shut over Sellafield scandal (24 Feb 00 | Europe)
Nuclear plant safety condemned (18 Feb 00 | UK)
'Rotten' Sellafield sparks fury (18 Feb 00 | UK)
Sellafield nuclear scandal 'deepens' (17 Feb 00 | UK)
Nuclear workers sacked for fake checks (06 Oct 99 | The Company File)
Nuclear plant under attack from MP (16 Sep 99 | Northern Ireland)

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