SAFETY standards will be compromised during Britain's [GBP]70 billion programme to clean up the radioactive mess left by the nuclear industry, trade unionists have warned.

Scientists and engineers from within the industry have said that short-term competitive contracts awarded by the government's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) would undermine safety procedures and put the public at risk.

The NDA is inviting multinational companies to bid for three-year contracts to clean up old nuclear complexes like Dounreay in Caithness and Sellafield in Cumbria. Until now the sites have been run by government agencies.

But according to Prospect, the biggest union in the nuclear industry, the NDA is pressing ahead too fast. As a result rules could be broken and accidents could happen, the union argued.

"Senior management and staff will be distracted by the need to win their next contract and the risk of safety breaches will increase greatly, " said Ian Clark, a Prospect official from the UK Atomic Energy Authority, which runs Dounreay.

US companies were likely to win some of the contracts, he pointed out. They were used to operating in a different regulatory environment so standards in the UK would decline, he claimed.

Audrey Uppington, an official from British Nuclear Fuels, which runs Sellafield, stressed that safety had to remain paramount. Short-term contracts "have the potential to harm the workforce and the population at large", she said.

A recent Prospect conference called on the NDA to lengthen clean-up contracts and for health, safety and environmental standards to be put at the top of competition criteria. Prospect represents 11,000 scientists, engineers and managers in the nuclear industry.

The NDA denied that its new contracts would erode safety, pointing out that regulatory regimes would stay the same.

"Safety is improved by bringing in worldclass contractors, " a spokesman said In previous reports, however, the Sunday Herald has revealed that senior managers and regulators share Prospect's concerns. "Like many others, including people in the industry, we fear a nuclear debacle like Railtrack, " said Pete Roche, a consultant to Greenpeace.