nuclear-news

Cost overruns at Sellafield nuclear waste site to hit £136bn

Storage facility is not delivering value for money as large projects are running
behind schedule, warns spending watchdog.

The cost of managing Britain’s most hazardous nuclear waste has risen by almost a fifth to £136 billion due to a failure to set a realistic budget, the government’s spending
watchdog has concluded.

Sellafield, which is home to about 85 per cent of the UK’s nuclear waste and stores the most hazardous waste, is not delivering value for money as large projects are running behind schedule and over budget, according to the National Audit Office’s latest
assessment.

The site in Cumbria is operated by the Nuclear Decommissioning
Authority (NDA), a mainly taxpayer-funded body, and over its lifetime will
retrieve about 3.3 million m3 of waste from ageing facilities and store it
in more modern silos. The cost of maintaining the site into the next
century, when Sellafield is scheduled for demolition, is likely to cost
£136 billion after adjusting for inflation, up from £84 billion at March
2019, but could run to £253 billion under a worst-case scenario.

None of the budgets for the four big projects under way at Sellafield in 2018, when
the audit office last scrutinised the waste storage site, accounted for
“optimism bias”, which assumes work will be delivered on time and
within budget. More realistic costings were only included in 2018, despite
the watchdog recommending the NDA require Sellafield to do so in 2012.
There has been some progress made since the National Audit Office last
scrutinised Sellafield, including savings of about £170 million a year by
operating the sites as subsidiaries rather than contracting out their
management and the government indemnifying the decommissioning authority
against certain risks so it no longer needs to buy insurance. The
Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said that the NAO’s report
showed “significant progress” had been made by Sellafield and the NDA
but “there is still more to do”.

 Times 23rd Oct 2024, https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/energy/article/cost-overruns-at-sellafield-nuclear-waste-site-to-hit-136bn-zjklxk3p7

October 25, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | UK, wastes