PANORAMA EXPOSE OF BNFL ARGUMENTS FOR THORP

That this House congratulates the BBC on its Panorama programme broadcast on 15th November exposing the fatally flawed arguments being made by an increasingly desperate British Nuclear Fuels to hoodwink Whitehall and the Government to support the opening of the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP) at Sellafield; welcomes the admission by two former senior executives of BNFL, interviewed by Panorama, that the rationale to recycle reprocessed uranium and plutonium in oxide and breeder reactor nuclear fuel advocated by BNFL at the 1977 Windscale Inquiry is no longer valid with the collapse in the global price of uranium and phase-out of fast breeder reactors; believes the current chairman of BNFL, John Guinness, was misleading in his letter to The Guardian of 22nd October claiming that the positive economic assessment of THORP conducted by Touche Ross accountants in 1992 had been examined by two leading independent analysts from Hoare Govett and the London Business School, which had concluded that the case for going ahead with THORP was robust; welcomes the revelation by Panorama that neither independent analyst was given full access to the full Touche Ross report; concludes this is a further example of BNFL's tradition of extreme economy with the truth; and calls upon Her Majesty's Government to heed the demand by objectors to THORP in the United Kingdom and abroad to either cancel the THORP project or hold a full public inquiry prior to deciding on consent to open THORP.