 Its customers have included the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, Sellafield Ltd, Westinghouse, the Health and Safety Executive, the Ministry of Defence, the UK Atomic Energy Authority, VT Nuclear and British Energy.It also has extensive links with academia, including collaborative agreements on waste immobilisation and disposal with the University of Sheffield and on nuclear materials research with the University of Manchester.The organisation began to come together in 1996 when a number of separate research and development facilities began to coalesce into a single unit within British Nuclear Fuels.