One of the world’s major nuclear energy companies is to implement a full corporate social responsibility strategy by 2008.
British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) hopes to have defined the strategy by next year, when it will begin ‘promoting the spread of CSR good practice throughout the group’.
The UK-based company, which employs 23,000 people in 16 countries, says the next 12 months ‘will be about defining our CSR strategy and converting it into fresh business thinking and action at all levels.’
It intends to integrate CSR into day-to-day operations by developing a CSR management structure endorsed by the board of directors. A newly-created CSR subcommittee chaired by non-executive director Joe Darby will finalize the structure by the end of this year, and will meet at least three times a year. All board members can attend meetings of the subcommittee.
BNFL says it wants to move away from its recent focus on developing business principles to the creation of a full CSR strategy and action plan, with business units ‘leading the key packages of work’.
An internal working group set up earlier this year to look at ‘the status of CSR in BNFL’ concluded that the company needs to engage more with its stakeholders and define an ‘impact footprint’ for key sites with more than 250 employees. The company has been holding formal stakeholder dialogue on environmental issues since 1998.
One challenge for the group is to convince interested parties that its record on radioactive discharges is improving. BNFL says its discharge levels to the sea are now one per cent of the levels recorded during the 1970s, and that its employees are only exposed to a third of the annual average radiation dose received by the average US citizen.
The group has made a commitment to ‘progressively reduce discharges of radioactive and chemical substances into the North-east Atlantic Ocean’ and has repositioned itself as an energy provider that emits virtually no carbon dioxide, which plays an important part in global warming.
BNFL, which is wholly-owned by the UK government and lost around £260million ($414m) last year on turnover of £2billion, outlines its plans in its first CSR report, a 56-page document verified by Ernst & Young.
The public entrance of a nuclear energy company into the CSR field is likely to renew debate on whether companies in the sector can ever be socially responsible, given the risks associated with nuclear power generation. ‘Rebuilding trust ... will require us to demonstrate a willingness to listen and engage ... and to respond to concerns,’ the report says.
BNFL will hope that, like British American Tobacco, it can go some way to shaking off its pariah status by implementing CSR policies across all its operations.
John Drummond, managing director of the Integrity Works consultancy, said: ‘There are certain people BNFL is never going to convince, but it is commendable that a company of this type appears willing to become more transparent.’