WASHINGTON, March 21 -- From simmering tanks of high-level nuclear waste in Washington State and plutonium laced with chemical poisons in Idaho to production of radioactive gases in South Carolina, the federal government's nuclear weapons program has festering technical and environmental problems like no one else in the country.

With no easy way to solve them, the Energy Department has gone to one of the few entities in the world with experience as broad as its own: British Nuclear Fuels, part of the nuclear power and weapons agency of the British government, now spun off as a government-owned company.

But as the British company now known as BNFL prepares to tackle the American problems, an embarrassing lapse has emerged back home in its core business, which is producing plutonium fuel. British government inspectors reported in February that for months, employees who were supposed to be performing a final measurement of fuel pellets bound for Japanese reactors were instead copying numbers from previous shipments. BNFL executives said workers felt the work was boring and a crew on the night shift had apparently found it easier to falsify the numbers.

Concern over the company's business practices is now affecting its contracts with the United States government. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, in a telephone interview from Algeria, where he is meeting OPEC ministers, said he had ordered his department to send a team to England to meet with British investigators. "We are now placing BNFL under extra scrutiny because of these problems," he said. "I have been uneasy about some of their operations in the U.S. If we uncover anything, I will take swift and strong action."

He added, "Business as usual is over with BNFL and with all our contractors, but especially with BNFL." The situation, Mr. Richardson said, was "itching for stronger management review."

The company said the incident with the pellets was an isolated problem. "We feel very badly about the pellets," said David R. Bonser, a director of the government-owned company, and head of waste management and decommissioning. He said it was a problem caused by "a handful of people in one of the plants who did things they absolutely should not have done."

Britain's nuclear installations inspection agency, however, rejected that defense. "Although various individuals were at fault, a systematic failure allowed it to happen," a report, published in February, said. "In a plant with the proper safety culture, the events described in this report could not have happened."

John J. Taylor, the company's chief executive, has resigned, but the company's problems continue. Sellafield, the plant on the west coast of England where the fuel was made, was never popular with neighbors: for years it has dumped radioactive waste into the Irish Sea; English anti-nuclear advocates and the Irish government would like it shut; and the British government reported that pigeons in the area had become radioactive from the plant's emissions. But now the problem is not just with neighbors, but with customers.

Japan asked the British company to take back the fuel, although the company insists that two automatic systems measured the pellets and found their diameter to be within specifications. A German utility, PreussenElektra A.G., shut a reactor running on the fuel that was not properly measured, and asked for compensation; Germany also suspended imports of additional fuel.

Well before its fuel problem at Sellafield, however, it was clear to leaders of the British company that the future profitability of that business was uncertain. As a result, they moved decisively into the United States. With an American partner, the Morrison Knudson Corporation, the company acquired many assets of the old Westinghouse Corporation, which had been a major Energy Department contractor; it also bid directly on Energy Department work at Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Hanford, Wash. And it has hired several former Energy Department officials, including one who approved giving a contract to BNFL without making the company take part in a fully competitive bidding process.

The Hanford contract, which involves solidifying liquid nuclear wastes in glass, is expected to take decades and cost tens of billions of dollars. At Hanford, BNFL hired the Energy Department's former site manager, one of four high-ranking Energy Department officials now on its payroll.

Meanwhile, a coalition of American groups that has been pressing the Energy Department for years to clean up its nation-wide archipelago of weapons operations plans to file a petition with the department on Thursday urging that BNFL be barred from government contracts, for lack of integrity and competence. "We think clearly a case can be made, and that the case is self-evident, that this is a company that does not possess those qualities," said Thomas Carpenter, a lawyer with the Government Accountability Project, in Seattle.

The problem is serious for the Energy Department, critics say, because its track record on overseeing its contractors is particularly poor. No evidence of wrongdoing has been found in BNFL's American operations. But at Rocky Flats, near Denver, where a BNFL subsidiary works in plutonium clean-up, a prior contractor committed five felony violations of environmental laws with no apparent notice from the department, which owned the plant. At Savannah River, where the company is now involved with the plant that refuels hydrogen bombs with a radioactive form of hydrogen gas, a prior contractor's list of 30 reactor accidents over the years came as a complete surprise to top Energy Department officials.

Secretary Richardson has had the department put special emphasis on improving its oversight, but in January of this year a report by its own inspector general complained that at Hanford, where BNFL has been selected for the largest environmental cleanup in the country, the department lacked the personnel, plans and other management tools needed to oversee the project. Without those plans, the inspector general warned, "the Department may be unable to control, predict, explain, or defend future changes to cost and schedule." The cost estimate is now $47 billion, up from an estimate of $30 billion to $38 billion in 1996. The company's portion would be $6.8 billion to $10 billion, by current estimates. A decision on a contract is supposed to be made by August.

In addition, outside groups that have followed the Energy Department's clean-up efforts for years now say that the company has taken on other jobs for the department in areas in which it has no special qualifications. For example, in Oak Ridge, the department has enormous derelict factories that it formerly used to enrich uranium for reactor and weapons fuel, and which it would like to release for private industrial use. Forgoing bidding, the Energy Department gave BNFL a $238 million contract in 1997 based on the idea that it had done similar work at Capenhurst, in England. The department relied on a contracting system called "other than full and open competition."

The Energy Department reported to Congress that it wanted BNFL because of "efficiencies in the approach to recycle and building decontamination based on the company's successful experiences at Capbenhurst." A key point for the Energy Department was the ability to decontaminate tons of nickel, a valuable metal that was used in the enrichment process.

But the company did not do that work at Capenhurst; the nickel there is still contaminated. And the system it proposed to use for decontamination of nickel at Oak Ridge is now the subject of a patent dispute between its American inventor and the Energy Department. In a suit brought by the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union against the plan, a federal district court judge in Washington described the process as "entirely experimental." Because of uncertainty about what standards should apply, the department has dropped plans, for now at least, to sell the nickel on the open market.

The contracting officer for the Energy Department who approved "other than full and open competition" later went to work for BNFL. So did the former manager of the Hanford site, who is now an executive vice president at an American subsidiary of the company, and so did the former manager of the Energy Department's Idaho Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, where BNFL won a contract to build an incinerator for plutonium mixed with hazardous chemicals not far from Yellowstone National Park.

"They're swallowing fairly important and influential executives right and left," said Mr. Carpenter of the Government Accountability Project. Energy Department officials said that none of the officials had violated any conflict-of-interest rules. BNFL's problems at Sellafield have produced ammunition for a group opposed to the incinerator, Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free, as they have for other critics around the country.

"It is inconceivable," said Tom Patricelli, the group's executive director, "that the United States government would allow a foreign corporation surrounded by such scandal and turmoil to build a first-of-its-kind incinerator on American soil, so close to the crown jewel of our national park system."

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