The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority

National Stakeholder Group Challenges NDA Thinking

10 December 2007

 

Stakeholders challenged the NDA to clarify the thinking behind its Draft Three-year Business Plan when they met for the 5th National Stakeholder Group meeting in Gateshead on 22 and 23 November 2007.

Consultation on the Business Plan Draft started on 7 November 2007, but stakeholders took advantage of the meeting to debate its content and direction with the NDA's Executive Directors who were all in attendance.

Dr Ian Roxburgh, NDA Chief Executive, told the meeting the Draft Business Plan describes how the NDA is delivering its Strategy, which supports its clear priority to focus on dealing with the high hazard.

He said the NDA was created by the Government to deal with the 50-year backlog of liabilities. Its role is to decommission and clean up the sites and restore them to agreed end states.

Competition Model

Competition will bring world class management teams to the industry. Ian Roxburgh told the meeting that UKAEA at Dounreay had pre-empted the value of this and through a partnership with CH2M Hill and AMEC have made a real difference to the decommissioning and clean-up of the site. He cites the example of how work has finished on contaminated facilities. This work had previously been estimated as taking 20 years to complete.

Ian said:

"We know the competition model works. UKAEA at Dounreay jumped ahead of the competition process and brought in CH2M Hill and AMEC as partners a couple of years ago and they have together made a real difference. Contaminated facilities which could have taken 20 years to clean up have been finished already.”

Funding Higher Hazard

He said the challenges faced in dealing with the high hazard are profound and the recently announced budget of £8.56 billion over three years representing an increase of £671 million was fit for purpose in terms of meeting the NDA's agenda. The budget also saw an increase of 21% in Government funding to take into account the anticipated reduction in commercial income due to the planned closure of Wylfa and Oldbury power stations.

Ian said:

"The majority of the money properly goes to Sellafield which has the higher hazard"

However, he made it clear that, while activity on other sites would slow down or stop, the same principle would be applied to those parts of Sellafield which were not regarded as being a higher hazard.

Magnox Decommissioning

Ian pointed out to stakeholders the aspiration in the Draft Business Plan to find a lead Magnox site.

"I am committed to getting the Magnox stations taken down as soon as possible. We can't yet make a business case for acceleration as we have 58,000 tonnes of Carbon 14 contaminated graphite to deal with. It is in the reactor core and to take it out and put it in another concrete sarcophagus simply does not make sense."

He said the NDA was working with the French and Japanese towards finding a solution to this shared problem.