Sir, - Your Editorial "BNFL and Russia" (August 31st) speculates that BNFL may emerge as one of the leading companies to undertake decommissioning andother contracts to deal with Russia's legacy of nuclear waste and to bring Russian nuclear installations up to acceptable safety standards.
This prospect, you say, "is enough to make one's hair stand on end." You conclude by suggesting that BNFL could gain invaluable experience, technique and credibility and advance practice by starting off with Sellafield as a pilot decommissioning project.
We, the workforce, have become accustomed to harsh criticism and sometimes cheap shots directed at us, our company and our community over the past several months in the wake of the NII reports on safety standards at Sellafield and the MOX fuel data scandal.
We accept that much of the harsh criticism was deserved. As a workforce, we have acknowledged our own role in the crisis that engulfed our company and did so much damage to its reputation as a world-class nuclear company seeking to operate to the highest standards.
We have fought back. We set up the Sort Out Sellafield campaign with the leaders of our community. We have demanded change in the management of safety across this site from the company and from our political leaders.
We are implementing the company's scheduled programme to meet all the NII's recommendations. Contrary to the inference in your editorial, Sellafield has not remained static over the past several months. A great deal of progress has been made. That there is much more to be done in the coming months is recognised and acknowledged by everyone working on this site.
One area of our work of which we remain justifiably proud is our record on decommissioning old and redundant plant and facilities at Sellafield itself and other nuclear sites in the UK.
The experience gained in this work and the expertise acquired have been instrumental in the success of the company in competing for contracts to clean up the legacy of the Cold War in the United States as well as our work on many projects in Russia in co-operation with other European companies, some of which were listed in the article you published on August 30th. We do not have "pretensions towards expertise" in decommissioning work; we already have the expertise and the technologies, many developed through our experience of reprocessing at Sellafield, that apply to this work.
With respect to your views, we hope our company, BNFL, will ultimately play a major role in much-needed decommissioning and safety standards work in Russia - not just because that work needs to be urgently carried out, but also because we know that BNFL can make an invaluable contribution to the success of any such clean-up programme. - Yours, etc.,
John Kane, Secretary, Sellafield Shop Stewards Committee, BNFL, Sellafield,Cumbria.