The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority

29 June 2007

Sir Anthony Cleaver, the NDA's Chairman, recently presented to the British Nuclear Energy Society, updating them on the progress we've made over the past two years and what issues lay ahead.

Creating a new market for nuclear decommissioning is a challenge; however, Sir Anthony explained that without an emphasis on safety, security and protection of the environment we cannot consider ourselves to have succeeded.

In addition, we must do all of this while still achieving value for money.

Sir Anthony said:

“It's an incredible technical, environmental and managerial challenge to deal with the variety, complexity and number of assets we have. We've made a great deal of progress in our two years of existence.

“We've now got a clear national strategy, consistent plans for all sites and we've achieved some early cost savings.

“The first competitions are underway, the industry has restructured and we've made some real movement on ensuring we have the right skills in place.

“We've also started to work with our stakeholders – setting up national and site groups, progressing our socio-economic policy and plans and working internationally.”

The presentation ended with some of the future challenges:

• the outcome of the UK Energy Review and how it will impact us – whether new nuclear power stations are built, or current ones have their lives extended;
• the success of competitions; and
• the re-starting of production in THORP.