British Nuclear Fuels Ltd has said it needs "more time to get our house in order" and may consider converting from its role of reprocessing nuclear material to storage following revelations about data falsification and the resulting drop in public confidence in its Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria.
The chairman of BNFL, Mr Hugh Collum, made his comments yesterday while giving evidence to the Commons Trade and Industry Select Committee which was considering the British government's planned partial privatisation of BNFL.
He told MPs the company was "badly damaged" by revelations about incompetent management and data falsification and conceded that BNFL needed to concentrate on regaining trust if it was to win new orders.
The British government has announced that its plan to partly privatise BNFL will be postponed until after the next general election, probably at the end of 2002, and Mr Collum said BNFL faced a major job to restore its reputation and customer confidence. He also gave an undertaking that employees at Sellafield working with MOX nuclear fuel would be retrained, and the quality of management would be improved.
He also told the Select Committee it was unlikely BNFL would meet any of the six performance targets set by the British government for this year, including a 25 per cent reduction in costs and profit improvements.
Senior management at BNFL had a duty to consider all alternatives, Mr Collum said, but while the company was not actively looking at moving from reprocessing to storage "we must be in a position to look at the unthinkable. Over the course of time we will look at these alternatives.
"We have no plans to change our strategy. If we have a viable profit base we have no intention of getting out of reprocessing, but we must be prepared to look at alternatives."
The chairman of the Select Committee, the Labour MP Mr Martin O'Neill, said the National Audit Office would be brought in to investigate the company if its reports and accounts were not made more "intelligible and transparent". He also accused the nuclear industry as a whole of treating the British government, parliament and public "with a degree of disdain with regard to getting hard financial facts".
The Select Committee was also told BNFL would respond to the Nuclear Installation Inspectorate report on the data falsification incident on April 8th. The company's chief executive, Mr Norman Askew, said he was confident the authorities would realise BNFL had acted on the report's recommendations, including organisational changes, but he refused to say whether any managers would lose their jobs.
Mr Jeremy Ryecroft, the commercial head of BNFL's THORP division, admitted the company's ability to win contracts from Germany was in doubt.