nuclear-news

UK’s nuclear decommissioning problems

What’s the future of nuclear decommissioning? Building.co.uk, 16 November 2012 | By Will Hurst Last week’s devastating National Audit Office report on decommissioning facilities at Sellafield has led many to question whether the UK has the skills needed to deal with nuclear waste. But does the problem really lie with a Nuclear Decommissioning Authority overly occupied with cutting costs? Will Hurst investigates.

Are British construction firms up to the job of building the precision facilities needed at the country’s largest and most hazardous nuclear site? That was the question hanging in the air this week after the release of a damning report on the nuclear decommissioning operation at Sellafield by spending watchdog the National Audit Office.

The report, published last week, said that “gaps in the capability of subcontractors to undertake work to the standards required for nuclear installations” had contributed to delays and up to £1bn of cost overruns at the site, which is controlled by Sellafield Ltd, a consortium comprising contractor Amec, engineer URS and French nuclear firm Areva.

It said that the portfolio of 14 major projects at Sellafield has not provided good value for money to date and pointed in particular to problems on Evaporator D, a £400m facility intended to reduce the volume of highly active “liquor” created by reprocessing spent nuclear fuel. On this project, poor welding by contractor Costain’s subcontractors led to delays, which contributed £50m towards a cost increase of £244m for the project, according to the report.

With overall client the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) due to spend a total of £37bn on cleaning up and decommissioning work at Sellafield alone, this area of the nuclear industry is clearly a huge opportunity for construction firms. But do they need to tackle a deficiency in their skills set or does the fault lie, as many claim, with an inadequate procurement system and a client that prioritises short-term cost savings over long-term value?

The author of the NAO report, Jill Goldsmith, told Building that engineering work at Sellafield is “clearly very complicated and “not the sort of thing that any old industry can master”. But talk to figures in the nuclear sector about skills capability and it rapidly becomes clear that there is a divide between those who believe there is a problem and those convinced that none exists.

Training bodies are in no doubt that there is a skills issue to be tackled across nuclear new build and decommissioning. David Edwards, Chief executive of the Engineering Construction Industry Training Board (ECITB), says the ageing workforce across the nuclear industry is one of the key challenges.

He says there is a “general skills shortage” which affects decommissioning and says high-integrity welding is a particular area which needs improvement.
Although decommissioning work has never gone away, the argument is that the quarter of a century hiatus in building new reactors has sapped the level of new talent entering the sector as a whole. “Most of the work over the past decade has been in repair and maintenance […] something like 80%,” he says. “That is not the same as building a new refinery, for example. There have been peaks in work but these have been smaller than in the past and that has skewed the age profile further. The bottom line is that there needs to be more people flowing into the industry.”

To address this, the ECITB – which works across the oil and gas, refining and chemical and conventional power sectors as well as nuclear – now supports 700-750 apprentice starts a year compared with a level of around 150 a decade ago. Other initiatives in the pipeline include a report by skills council Cogent on the nuclear workforce needed based on different scenarios about the sector’s future size, which is due out before the end of the year.

However, many in the industry itself reject the idea that a skills gap is to blame for problems at Sellafield, and claim it is the overall client, the NDA, which needs to get its house in order.

Paul Stapleton, head of energy at consultant EC Harris, agrees there is an ageing demographic to contend with but says the NDA pursues a “simplistic” procurement approach which does not incentivise firms to provide their best people and capabilities….. http://www.building.co.uk/analysis/features/whats-the-future-of-nuclear-decommissioning?/5045832.article

November 16, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | decommission reactor, UK