Taking over at Sellafield on the 1st April this year, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) will not be encouraged by the failure yet again of the Sellafield MOX Plant (SMP) to meet a production target. Neither will the NDA be pleased to discover that BNFL is having to take action against one reprocessing customer who refuses to pay his dues because BNFL has failed to reprocess his fuel on time. The NDA has been counting on both operations (MOX production and reprocessing at THORP) to provide revenues to help pay for the costs of clean-up at Sellafield.
Admitting to CORE last month that the active commissioning of SMP’s MOX fuel assembly stage had still not started, the company has now confirmed that, because of continuing problems, SMP is likely to miss its target of producing 3 MOX fuel assemblies by the 31st March. This target, already reduced from 12 to 3 assemblies, was set out in BNFL’s much vaunted 2004/05 ‘Near Term Work Plan’ (NTWP) for Sellafield. This must have serious implications for BNFL’s ability to meet its next crucial target – that of producing and delivering the 3 assemblies to Switzerland this summer in time for the Swiss power station Beznau’s annual outages for refuelling. If this is missed (for the third year running) SMP revenues to the NDA will not materialise and further MOX work may have to be sub-contracted.
Despite having first introduced plutonium into the plant some 39 months ago, SMP has still not produced one single MOX fuel assembly. The continuing failure has already lead to at least 4 orders from overseas customers being sub-contracted to BNFL’s rivals. With lost contracts and not a penny yet earned, and with additional plant modification expenses involved, the total cost of SMP is estimated to have rocketed to around £700M. In an effort to get the plant up and running, an embarrassed BNFL has had to call in a specialist team which includes experts from French arch-rivals Cogema.
The Mail on Sunday newspaper (6th March) has apparently reported that one German customer, from the Brokdorf PWR nuclear power station, is resisting payment to BNFL of ‘storage fees’ because it had failed to meet its reprocessing deadlines. The paper puts the storage fees at £2772 per day. Delays in payment at this level must also impact badly on revenues expected by the NDA from reprocessing contracts.
Brokdorf, in Northern Germany and now largely owned by the giant German company EoN, had contracted around 75 tonnes of spent fuel to be reprocessed at THORP. With ‘flagship’ THORP running almost two years behind schedule because of accidents and breakdowns and more recent problems with vitrifying the liquid high level wastes produced by the process, the Brokdorf fuel will clearly not have been reprocessed as originally scheduled in year 2000.
In that same year, at a private meeting with BNFL, overseas customers expressed their anger and frustration at ‘the cost increases presented by BNFL again and again’. Concerns were also voiced about a ‘situation now becoming critical’ whereby some cusomers were ‘calling into question whether BNFL has breached the implied terms of the contract due to the lack of performance in the areas of reprocessing and vitrification’.