nuclear-news

UK spending watchdog warns on costs of cleaning up old nuclear plants Decommissioning charge has risen by £3bn since 2017 and there remains ‘inherent uncertainty’ over final bill, NAO finds   Ft.com, Nathalie Thomas in Edinburgh  11  Sept 20, 

 The spending watchdog also found that the costs to the taxpayer of a botched 2014 tender process to outsource the decommissioning to the private sector was £20m higher than when it last investigated three years ago.

Cleaning up the Magnox sites, which were built before privatisation and include Hunterston A in Scotland and Hinkley Point A in Somerset, has turned into a costly and torturous affair. In 2016 the High Court ruled the 2014 competition for a 14-year contract to decommission the sites — which had been awarded to Cavendish Fluor Partnership, or CFP, a joint venture between UK-based Babcock International and Fluor of the US — had been “fudged” by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, a body attached to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

A year later ministers, acting on legal advice, terminated the arrangement with CFP nine years early and renegotiated a shorter contract that ran until the end of August 2019. Decommissioning of the sites was then brought in-house by the NDA.  ………. https://www.ft.com/content/6f313c84-d314-4160-b124-a68c4e85be09