Amongst a raft of Cumbrian ventures to have won funding last week from the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) is the proposed Nuclear Technology Innovation Gateway. £1.5M of taxpayers’ money has been secured for the new facility by Cumbria’s Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) and, over the next 2 years, will go towards the £26.5M total cost of the facility. The cash injection, through the Government’s Local Growth Fund, was welcomed by LEP’s Board Chairman George Beveridge who is also Sellafield Ltd’s Deputy Managing Director and Chief Business Officer.
The Nuclear Technology Innovation Gateway, to be built at Westlakes – Sellafelds’s satellite science park close to Whitehaven – is billed as being the centrepiece of the Cumbria Centre of Nuclear Excellence programme. With ‘remainder funding’ earmarked from the University of Manchester, the National Nuclear Laboratory and Europe to meet the total £26.5M cost, construction of the facility is scheduled for completion by 2017.
Yet the project will only create 60 jobs by 2020 – a fraction of those projected to be created by all the other Cumbrian ventures to have secured funding from BIS last week. For example a £2M cash injection from BIS for an Opportunity Connectivity project which is designed to improve sustainable travel and access to visitor destinations within Cumbria is projected to create 450 jobs by 2020.
Equally as contentious as the poor return on jobs is the LEP claim that the Nuclear Technology Innovation Gateway will ‘showcase UK excellence in fuels, computing, reprocessing and remote engineering’ – a claim hardly borne out by Sellafield’s well documented record of project failures, poor commercial performance and accidents.
CORE’s spokesman Martin Forwood said today:
‘Wasting yet more taxpayers’ money on what is little more than a nuclear Vanity Project is an absolute travesty. This grandiosely named new facility – a Sellafield soapbox by any other name – does absolutely nothing to diversify the local economy and creates just 60 jobs by 2020 which, at the £26.5M cost of the facility, equates to some £440,000 per job. As the list of other BIS cash recipients shows, there are far more deserving and worthwhile non-nuclear causes in the County than yet another propaganda platform for the nuclear industry’.
It remains to be seen exactly how the new facility will ‘showcase’ expertise in reprocessing and ‘the area’s unique fuel fabrication expertise for the conversion of UK’s current and future plutonium stock into productive nuclear fuel’ (LEP, Cumbria Strategic Economic Plan 2014-2024, page 14). Whilst the accident-prone reprocessing operations at Sellafield (THORP and Magnox) are years behind schedule and routinely miss their annual targets, past attempts to convert plutonium into new fuel (MOX) have ended in an embarrassing and costly failure. The Sellafield MOX Plant (SMP), designed to produce 120 tonnes of new fuel annually, was closed down in 2011 after 9 years of operation during which just 13.5 tonnes of the plutonium-based fuel was produced in total – at a cost to the UK taxpayer of over £1Bn.
Full details of the BIS handouts can be found in Cumbria LEP Press Release of 7th July at http://www.cumbrialep.co.uk/latest-news/.