The Government is to increase pressure on Britain to consider a temporary closure of the Sellafield plant operated by British Nuclear Fuels following publication of a report which found that key safety data on fuel rods had been falsified.
The Minister of State at the Department of Public Enterprise, Mr Joe Jacob, said that he was very disturbed at the revelations and wanted an early meeting with his British counterpart, Ms Helen Liddell. He said that the picture was of a company with "deep safety culture deficiencies".
Dr Tom O'Flaherty, chief executive of the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland, said that fears among many Irish people of a possible accident at Sellafield were "clearly well-founded". RPII officials are expected to meet their counterparts in the British inspectorate early next week.
British government safety experts are understood to have threatened to shut down the plant.
A Downing Street spokesman said: "This is serious, it is unacceptable and something needs to be done about it. Something will be done about it."
The report, which was prepared by the chief inspector of nuclear installations in the United Kingdom, documents how quality control data was falsified at the uranium and plutonium mixed-oxide fuel (MOX) plant, a section which opened in 1994.
BNFL's chief executive, Mr John Taylor, was in Osaka yesterday to attempt to explain to his main Japanese customer, Kansai Electric Power, how BNFL sent a shipload of nuclear fuel with falsified data to Kansai last October. The Japanese government demanded last week that BNFL should take the consignment of MOX fuel back to Britain.
One of BNFL's largest contracts is with Japan, which hopes to run up to 18 reactors on the fuel rods by 2010. Japan may now switch to French suppliers.
An inspection of the Sellafield plant last August revealed irregularities in the sampling of fuel rods. Data relating to the size of the pellets which produce the rods had been falsified.
Britain's Nuclear Installations Inspectorate blamed systematic management failure for allowing individual workers to falsify safety records for years. Five staff at the plant have been dismissed.