By stewartb

With the Labour government in Westminster embracing nuclear energy just as much as the Tories before it – committed to more big nuclear power stations and to ‘small modular reactors’ – it’s instructive, sensible and sobering to read about the legacy of the UK’s past investments in civil nuclear power. There is much in the recent National Audit Office (NAO) report that should – but won’t – change Westminster/Whitehall establishment minds about the merits of another generation of nuclear power installations.

Source National Audit Office (16 October 2024) Decommissioning Sellafield: managing risks from the nuclear legacy – Department for Energy Security & Net Zero, Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/decommissioning-sellafield-managing-risks-from-the-nuclear-legacy.pdf )

In the words of the NAO on Sellafield: ‘.. the NDA expects full site remediation will take until 2125.’ So 100 years!

Sellafield spend in 2023-24 = £2.7 billion. Delay retrieving all waste from four of Sellafield’s oldest storage facilities, compared with the position when the NAO reported in 2018 = 13 years. And from Para 3.16 of the NAO report: ‘Sellafield spends the majority of its current funding on meeting legal obligations and reducing the highest hazards …….. It spends relatively little on decommissioning and demolishing buildings: just £107 million in 2023‑24.’ So spending billions just to mark time?

NAO report summary Para 11: ‘There is no overall measurement of progress towards full decommissioning’.

Para 12: Sellafield ‘currently has nine major projects over £100 million in value, which are expected to cost £7.0 billion in total. The four major projects which were in progress in 2018 are now expected to cost £1.15 billion more and be delivered much later than forecast.’

Para 13: ‘Sellafield has to empty waste from ageing facilities which pose an ‘intolerable’ risk, and store it in buildings which meet modern standards. The risk these facilities pose is illustrated by the Magnox Swarf Storage Silo, which is leaking 2,100 litres of contaminated water each day. … (Sellafield and its regulators believe that current leakage rates pose a low risk to workers and the public).’

And more on the latter, from Para 2.16: ‘… MSSS (Magnox Swarf Storage Silo) has been leaking contaminated water into the ground since 2019; the rate is currently estimated at around 2,100 litres per day. Sellafield is unable to fix the leak, meaning it may continue until this part of the silo is emptied in the late 2040s or early 2050s.’

Para 14: ‘Sellafield recognised in late 2023 that it did not have a coherent plan to sustain vital sample analysis capabilities. These scientific tests are essential, for example to enable safe removal and treatment of waste from ageing facilities, and to store plutonium safely. The existing testing facility is over 70 years old and in extremely poor condition, but Sellafield paused work on a project to refurbish another building (which had been expected to replace it) in 2024 (7.5 years after it started, after it had spent around £265 million) due to increasing concerns about the condition of the buildings and the delay it was likely to cause to another major project.’

Para 15: ‘Sellafield still has to address known cyber security issues.‘

Para 16: ‘Increases in Sellafield’s forecast cost of decommissioning demonstrate that it is still identifying new risks and the cost of addressing these. …. the Sellafield provision was £136 billion in March 2024, 18.8% higher than it was in March 2019 (after adjusting for inflation).’

Para 17: ‘Sellafield still faces a great deal of uncertainty about what it needs to do, and by when, but it is making increasing use of new tools to plan and prioritise better. Some of this uncertainty comes from Sellafield’s own lack of data on asset condition: it is not clear how long key assets will need to remain operational for, or whether they are likely to last long enough. Other factors are outside of Sellafield’s control, for example decisions over when and whether a Geological Disposal Facility will be available to store waste from Sellafield permanently. The site for this has not been chosen yet, and the opening date has already moved from 2040 to the 2050s at the earliest.’

Para 1.12: ‘Sellafield has frequently been too optimistic about how performance will improve, and has not taken decisive action to respond to serious issues. Sellafield has also struggled to improve how it handles conventional safety hazards (such as asbestos, fire protection and Legionella) which have recurred in a number of areas, indicating that it is not good at learning lessons on an organisational level.’

Para 3.3: ‘The NDA’s accounts include an estimate of the future cost of decommissioning its sites – the ‘nuclear provision’. The forecast cost of decommissioning Sellafield, £136 billion, makes up 68% of the total NDA provision of £199 billion. This is inherently a highly uncertain estimate – Sellafield has to make assumptions about what the task involves, how it expects to clean up the site and forecast costs a hundred years in the future. The NDA believes the cost of decommissioning Sellafield could range from £116 billion to £253 billion.’ And then there are the costs of decommissioning all the individual nuclear power stations.

Para 3.14: ‘In September 2021, Sellafield rated the condition of 70% of its most important (‘Critical’) assets as either ‘Good’ or ‘Acceptable’ . However, it now believes only 42% are in these condition states.’

Imagine if findings like those above – indeed even any one of the operational findings – had been reported by Audit Scotland for a facility for which the Scottish Government had ultimate responsibility, even for a much less critical/less dangerous one than the Sellafield nuclear site.

It seems as if for most people (voters) Sellafield is out of sight and out of mind as pro-nuclear lobbyists and Westminster governments state that shiny new nuclear power plants are critical to the UK’s green transition – and also that Scotland should take its share of the long term ‘benefits’ by having ones located here.