Auditor slams Sellafield clean-up projects

London – Decommissioning work at Sellafield, the UK’s largest and most hazardous nuclear site, has been poor and not cost effective, a report by the National Audit Office (NAO) has found.

While noting the challenges faced by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), the NAO said that “to date the performance of some of the major projects at Sellafield has been poor.”

Some of the NDA’s 14 major projects at Sellafield have not provided good value for money, it added. These included the design and build of complex chemical engineering projects to retrieve, package and store hazardous nuclear material from old facilities.

The projects range in cost from £21 million to £1.3 billion, with 12 delivered less than planned during 2011-2012, which could delay risk and hazard reduction, said the NAO.

The report did acknowledge that the Authority had taken steps to improve matters including the appointment of Nuclear Management Partners Ltd as the ‘parent body’ of Sellafield Ltd and plan to strengthen the fee incentive framework from 2014.

The report went on to note improvements in commercial operations on the site, including the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, and expected delivery of at least 80% of its planned savings of £1.4 billion.

The NDA inherited a legacy of poor planning and neglect over several decades when it took over Sellafield in April 2005. In May 2011, though, it approved a more robust lifetime plan for the clean-up of Sellafield site by 2120, replacing a previous unrealistic plan, said the report.

With the new plan, the Authority’s provision for decommissioning the site increased to £67 billion as at March 2012, up from £47 billion as at March 2009.

“Significant uncertainties and scheduling risks remain, which the authority is working to understand and address,” cautioned the NAO, adding that it was too early to judge if it would deliver value for money.

For example, there is uncertainty over the time required and cost of completing facilities to treat and store highly radioactive material held in deteriorating legacy ponds and silos.

“Owing to historic neglect, the Authority faces a considerable challenge in taking forward decommissioning at Sellafield. It is good that the Authority now has a more robust lifetime plan in place but it cannot say with certainty how long it will take to deal with hazardous radioactive waste at Sellafield or how much it will cost,” said Amyas Morse, head of the NAO.

“Securing future value for money will depend on the Authority’s ability to act as an intelligent client, to benchmark proposed levels of performance and to provide better contractual incentives for making faster progress towards risk and hazard reduction,” concluded Morse.