The disclosure – which is likely to raise considerable concern in both the German and British governments – could deliver the final blow to the controversial Cumbrian nuclear complex. Sellafield sent nuclear fuel with fabricated safety data to Germany as well as to Japan it emerged yesterday. The disclosure – which is likely to raise considerable concern in both the German and British governments – could deliver the final blow to the controversial Cumbrian nuclear complex.
Japan, Sellafield’s largest customer, is already refusing to take any more fuel from the plant after The Independent revealed last year that it had been sent fuel with falsified safety records.Now Germany, its second biggest customer, may follow suit. This would deprive the plant of almost all its sales of mixed oxide (mox) nuclear fuel and destroy the rationale for its main business, nuclear reprocessing.The Green Party, the junior partner in Germany’s coalition government, is already pressing for the country to stop doing business with Sellafield and key members said last night that this admission would considerably strengthen its hand.The admission follows publication on Friday of three safety reports by the official Nuclear Installations Inspectorate. They revealed an extraordinary catalogue of “systematic management failure” at BNFL – and both the inspectorate and energy minister Helen Liddell have given the firm two months to put its house in order or face possible closure of the plant.The report also revealed that workers at the plant had falsified safety checks on at least 31 “lots” – each containing some 4,000 pellets of mixed plutonium and uranium fuel.

Though BNFL initially denied that any of this fuel had left the plant, the inspectorate concluded that eight assemblies made of it have been sent to Japan. The report mentioned, almost in passing, that one example of falsification as long ago as 1996 had been found, when fuel with forged safety data was sent to Germany.BNFL insists the fuel was safe. A BNFL spokesman said: “That fuel has been in a German reactor for three years and performed perfectly well.”If Japan and Germany pull out, BNFL’s sales of mox fuel – and a new plant it has constructed to make it – will be doomed. And the rationale of its main business, reprocessing used nuclear fuel, will disappear.Dr Patrick Green, energy campaigner for Friends of the Earth, said: “This looks like being the final nail in the coffin of BNFL’s plutonium business.”. Typhoons are set to go PC No longer will they be called Bret or Cindy or Floyd. The tropical storms which rip through the Pacific and south Asia will shed their “imperialist” English Christian names, and instead, in a move that hurricane watchers hope will save lives and appease the political correctness lobby, will be named after local animals and deities

Typhoons are set to go PC No longer will they be called Bret or Cindy or Floyd.

The tropical storms which rip through the Pacific and south Asia will shed their “imperialist” English Christian names, and instead, in a move that hurricane watchers hope will save lives and appease the political correctness lobby, will be named after local animals and deities.
The 14 countries bordering the north-west Pacific and the South China Sea have agreed to make the change this year, from the start of the typhoon season in June. The first will be called Damrey, Cambodian for elephant, the next Longwang, the Chinese god of rain, then Kriogi, a North Korean wild goose – and so on down a list painstakingly compiled by the UN Economic & Social Commission from Asia and the Pacific, and the World Meteorological Organisation.”The English names meant nothing to people in that area,” says Richard Hagemeyer of the Joint Typhoon Warning Centre in Honolulu, which has been naming the storms for decades “Names in the vernacular will focus attention and interest. It has the capability of reducing the potential of loss of life.”The new names will draw on several languages including Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Marshallese, Cambodian and Korean. The naming of typhoons – known as hurricanes in the Atlantic – has constantly fallen foul of political correctness.

For centuries they were called after the Christian saints on whose day they began, but by the late 19th century this was thought sacrilegious. They then got female English names, in alphabetical order, but men’s names were added in 1978 to rebuff charges of sexism.In the latest twist, Friends of the Earth wants to show up global warming culprits in the names. “At present companies are living in a fantasy world, denying the effects of their activities on the climate,” said Tony Juniper, FoE’s policy director, speaking about how global warming increases tropical storms. “Publicity about a Typhoon Texaco or Hurricane Vauxhall, would hit firms where it hurts, in theirpublic image.”. A national project to restore the English elm to the countryside will next month plant its first saplings in the wild, 30 years after the species was almost wiped out by Dutch elm disease. A national project to restore the English elm to the countryside will next month plant its first saplings in the wild, 30 years after the species was almost wiped out by Dutch elm disease.
Several hundred saplings taken from elms that survived the disease in the late 1960s and 1970s will be planted in the hope that a new generation of disease-resistant elms will re-establish one of the nation’s best-loved trees.Dutch Elm disease killed some 25 million elms in the United Kingdom but despite widespread public assumption that the disease eliminated the tree altogether, some five million remain.The National Elm Programme has taken cuttings from those elms that are more than 60 years old in the hope that they possess a genetic predisposition that enabled them to resist the fungus.The programme is being run by the Conservation Foundation, an environmental charity, with support from the Forestry Commission, the leading organisation monitoring the effects of Dutch elm disease since it first appeared in Britain. While there have been small-scale, localised attempts to replant elm trees before, this project, which has commercial funding, is the first on a national scale.