You would have expected him to start interrogating the issue, but he didn’t. “At least one member of the Pearson staff actually cried when they heard Greg was going. After that, he was really friendly and relaxed in his last days – in fact, he spent his last night at Pearson TV drinking and joking with television colleagues in a Cambridge bar.”Sir John’s style is practically the opposite. “The Executive Committee includes the top BBC honchos who have been promoted by Birt but don’t know whether their heads will be lopped off by Dyke.”At midday wine was brought in and business suspended to allow the committee to say goodbye.Lunch was typical of John Birt: stylish but sensible – roasted peppers and goat’s cheese to start, followed by fish. It was pleasant enough, said colleagues, but overall Sir John’s last day was not a highly charged, tear-jerking affair.”John leaving the BBC is quite different from Greg leaving Pearson,” said a colleague of Mr Dyke. Sir John Birt was never likely to spend yesterday – his last day at the BBC – swigging champagne, hugging the staff and cracking jokes.

Openly emotional farewells are just not typical of a man who was far more famous as director-general for his policy directives than his bonhomie.
Instead, he opted for business as usual. He arrived for at work at Broadcasting House at 8.30am, went to his office and went through his usual routines with Katie Kay, the PA who has been close to him since his LWT days.Most of the day was spent in a meeting of the BBC Executive Committee, which includes his successor, Greg Dyke.”It must have been quite a heated atmosphere,” said an insider. Openly emotional farewells are just not typical of a man who was far more famous as director-general for his policy directives than his bonhomie. “It’s the worst crisis BNFL has faced in 30 years,” said John Kane, a union official at Sellafield.. Sir John Birt was never likely to spend yesterday – his last day at the BBC – swigging champagne, hugging the staff and cracking jokes. The trip will follow a delegation of British civil servants and nuclear inspectors, led by Anna Walker, the director-general for Energy at the Department of Trade and Industry.Helen Liddell, the industry minister responsible for BNFL, has made no secret of her anger at BNFL’s incompetent handling of the Mox fuel crisis and is anxious for Mrs Walker to persuade Japan to commit itself to future orders, on which the Government’s £1bn part-privatisation of the company depends.Sellafield workers remain anxious that if the Japanese cannot be persuaded to buy Mox fuel from Britain, their jobs could be on the line. It is a line that does not impress the Japanese, who insist that good quality control is crucial for retaining public confidence in nuclear safety.Next month Mr Collum is sending a “board level” delegation to Tokyo to try to soothe Japanese anger.

Production stopped last September, and all 120 Mox employees are undergoing retraining.In addition to suspending, and then sacking, the three employees held responsible, Hugh Collum, the new chairman of BNFL, launched a special project to find other guilty parties, who included the “mole” who leaked details of the scandal to The Independent.Mr Collum, a former executive with pharmaceuticals group SmithKline Beecham, repeated the company mantra that the problem was not a safety issue, but merely one of quality assurance. They said they had lost confidence in BNFL, cancelled future Mox orders until further notice and even raised the possibility of having the first consignment returned at huge cost.BNFL apologised and said it would do everything in its power to restore confidence, including a wholesale review of procedures at its Mox plant. “A detailed investigation into the fuel on its way to Japan has shown that it includes no fuel with falsified data and we can categorically confirm that it fully meets the specification and will perform safely and as required in the reactor,” BNFL said on 21 September.Yet by November, the NII’s own investigation began to reveal that the Japanese shipment had not escaped suspicion, and there was a growing realisation that BNFL had been wrong to dismiss any problems with Mox fuel sent to Japan.Yet the company continued to reassure its Japanese customers, notably Kansai, as well as the Japanese government through the Ministry of International Trade and Industry.Asked why the company did this, knowing that on 10 September it had told the NII that it suspected at least one fuel lot on its way to Japan to be falsified, the company said that between 10 and 13 September further information had come to light showing that the falsification was restricted to Mox fuel still at Sellafield.”Regrettably, subsequent more sophisticated investigations revealed that other lots were implicated and that data on fuel in Japan had been falsified,” it said.BNFL eventually informed the Japanese in December that the falsification had indeed affected the Mox fuel assemblies, which had by then been unloaded.After receiving repeated reassurances, Kansai and the Japanese government were understandably furious with BNFL’s apparent duplicity. British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) is facing the biggest crisis in its 30-year history following a disastrous collapse of confidence among its Japanese customers, who are outraged by the company’s incompetence and inability to be fully open with them.
At the heart of the scandal over the falsification of data at BNFL’s reprocessing plant at Sellafield in Cumbria is the issue of whether the company can be believed when it issues reassuring statements about its demonstration facility for manufacturing mixed uranium-plutonium oxide (Mox) fuel.Revelations that some Sellafield workers were falsifying safety data at the Mox demonstration facility have jeopardised the opening of a much larger Mox plant, costing £300m, which although built is still waiting for a government operating licence.The company first became aware that there was a problem in August last year when it realised that some of its employees were re-using old computer spreadsheets of quality assurance data when they were supposed to be filling in new ones after fresh checks on the dimensions of Mox fuel pellets.However, despite having a senior inspector from the Government’s Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII) on site at Sellafield, BNFL kept quiet and only chose to tell the inspectorate of the problem late in the evening of 10 September, the same day that The Independent informed the company that it intended to publish an article on the subject.BNFL told the NII inspector that it thought 11 lots of Mox fuel were involved in data fabrication and that one of them was on its way to Japan as part of the first shipment to nuclear reactors operated by the Kansai Electric Power Company.Yet on several subsequent occasions the company said in public statements that the data falsification did not extend to the Mox shipment then on its way to Japan, but only to fuel pellets that had not yet left the Sellafield site.A BNFL statement to The Independent on 10 September stated: “Some irregularities in data have been detected during the quality control checks on Mox fuel currently [our emphasis] being manufactured.”The clear implication was that the consignment already manufactured and being shipped to Japan was not affected by the falsification, a view supported by the sentence that followed: “All of the BNFL Mox fuel assemblies on the way to Japan have been fully certified by both BNFL and our Japanese customer, and we are confident they meet the specification.”Further statements affirmed this opinion. But the long-term prospects for Sellafield depend on winning Mox plant business expected to bring in revenues of up to £1bn.. British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) is facing the biggest crisis in its 30-year history following a disastrous collapse of confidence among its Japanese customers, who are outraged by the company’s incompetence and inability to be fully open with them.

Whitehall sources say the DTI is reviewing its commitment.BNFL has £14bn worth of fuel reprocessing contracts, providing a secure order book for nine years. BNFL had to back down after repeatedly reassuring Kansai that the fabrication scandal did not affect a Mox shipment already in Japan.Kansai cancelled Mox orders until further notice, jeopardising the opening of a new £300m Mox plant and raising the prospect of returning the only shipment of Mox which arrived in Japan. Full Japanese cancellation of Mox orders would be a severe blow to the Government’s plans to raise up to £2bn through the partial privatisation of BNFL early next year.The sell-off, the first big sale of state assets since Labour came to power, was announced last July by the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Stephen Byers, before the false data scandal blew up. Sources in BNFL say five shop-floor workers were interviewed this week and five managers at the Mox demonstration facility where it was manufactured face charges next week.BNFL is anxious to be seen to be taking a tough line after admitting it has lost the confidence of its main Japanese customer for Mox fuel, the Kansai Electric Company. Ten more nuclear workers at the Sellafield reprocessing plant in Cumbria face charges of gross misconduct following an investigation into faked plutonium data. Ten more nuclear workers at the Sellafield reprocessing plant in Cumbria face charges of gross misconduct following an investigation into faked plutonium data.
British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) has already sacked three employees for falsifying quality control data on mixed uranium-plutonium oxide (Mox) fuel and extended its disciplinary inquiry to senior managers. It’s one element of his greatness that he’s probably already looking for the next place to rest his foot..

He recently described translating Beowulf as being “like breaking stones for pleasure”, but the analogy was more jokey and less defensive. His “stepping-stones” have carried him across obstacles that would have defeated a lesser poet, and bought him to a place where his magisterial command is effectively uncontested. But one of the things that was really remarkable about him was that when it came to changes you’d say, ‘Would you like time to think about that?’ and he’d say, ‘No, let’s do it now’. He’d do five or six rewrites over the phone and they’d all be brilliant.”Now that the praise and the prizes have become the prevailing weather for him, Heaney has come to an easier accommodation with the lavishness of his own gift. “All my life I felt you should earn your keep by your labour,” he has said in interview. “If, for example, you are in a university, as I am now at Harvard, teach the load that other people teach: no special pleading on the ticket of your poetry.”This strenuous conscientiousness (a quality many people volunteer as one of his special qualities) may well arise from the fact that his talent has at least an element of magical ease. “Like all good writers he was easy to edit,” recalls Craig Raine, who worked on two of his books “He was modest as only great writers can be.