london

Britain's embattled nuclear waste disposal company Nirex has been given a one-year lease of life under a new part-time chairman, quashing speculation that it was on the verge of being wound up or merged with one of its shareholder companies.

A meeting of the Nirex board last week agreed to keep the company intact with no further job losses for the next 12 months and to maintain its £30 million (US$49 million) annual research budget. A final decision on Nirex's future will now depend on the new government's yet-to-be-announced plans for disposing of nearly 300,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste from nuclear power plants.

Speculation had been mounting before the meeting that Nirex was to merge with its largest shareholder, British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), which owns 40 per cent of Nirex.

But the board chose to bring the two closer together by appointing David Bonser, BNFL's director of waste management and decommissioning, as Nirex's new chairman.

The company's future was put in doubt last April (see N ature 386, 423–424; 1997) after the previous government blocked its plans to dispose of nuclear waste at a proposed underground repository at Sellafield in north-west England. Nirex had spent more than £200 million investigating the site. The choice of Sellafield had been opposed by the local authority and environmentalist groups, which also agree that waste must be retrievable.

With no immediate prospect of an alternative site to investigate, Nirex had little choice but to begin a rapid programme of retrenchment, and shed more than half of its 200 staff, including many scientists. Some believed that cuts would continue. But in a statement, Bonser said that he looked forward to “building for the future on [Nirex's] scientific excellence”.

Environmentalist groups have reacted coolly to the appointment, arguing that it suggests a ‘business as usual’ approach in an agency that has come under fire for its secrecy and for the perceived lack of public involvement in its decision to choose Sellafield. Helen Wallace, a senior scientist with Greenpeace, says Bonser's appointment will only reinforce such an impression. “Nirex is not going to gain any public support by appointing a nuclear industry insider.”

But one former government adviser on radioactive waste policy, while accepting that the choice of chairman “is not a step that will create public confidence”, says that the one-year moratorium on further changes and the appointment of a part-time chairman suggests that the nuclear industry wants to keep a watching brief over Nirex while giving the new government flexibility in planning for the future.

If it chose to do so, the government could still retain Nirex as the agency responsible for radioactive waste disposal, he says. But the board's decision does not foreclose the other option — preferred by environmentalist gr oups — of setting up a new, independent and publicly accountable agency.