Last year’s damning National Audit Office (NAO) report on Sellafield and the competence of its owners the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) – and the subsequent criticisms of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) following its visit to the site – had little positive to say about Sellafield apart from ‘other activities on the site have improved, notably the increase in the amount of spent nuclear fuel reprocessed each year’
Having noted that this reference to the site’s commercial operations (which were not part of the NAO report’s remit) bore no resemblance to the ‘facts on the ground’, CORE launched its investigation into how those operations had performed against annual targets and against original plant design specifications. The tabulated results of the investigation (available on request to CORE) reveal that in the 13-year period between financial years 2000/01 and 2012/13 the site missed 83% of commercial targets and that, since the NDA took ownership of Sellafield in 2005, the failure rate has risen to 94%.
CORE’s spokesman Martin Forwood said today:
‘This inept forecasting and poor plant performance shows that the NDA and Sellafield is not only failing in its clean up and major project work as identified by the NAO, but also in its every day ‘bread and butter’ commercial operations. These form an integral part of the NDA’s overall Sellafield portfolio and, as such, our findings will clearly be of interest to the PAC in terms of whether taxpayers are getting value for money from the Authority’
Sourced from industry documents in the public domain, CORE’s investigation shows that over the 13 year period:
• The THORP reprocessing plant met its annual targets only 5 times • The Magnox reprocessing plant just twice. • The Waste Vitrification Plant met its annual targets only 3 times in 13 years.
The failure rate for these three facilities is significantly worsened when viewed against the design production or throughput rate assigned to them when they opened or in updated assessments. THORP, for example, was designed to reprocess 850-1200 tonnes per year but has not once met that target in 19 years of operation and, following a major leakage accident in 2005 (which closed the plant for almost 3 years) is now physically incapable of doing so.
• The now defunct Sellafield MOX Plant also failed to meet every target set during nine years of operation.
Martin Forwood added:
‘The blame for what has become a ritual failure to set or meet annual commercial targets over recent years must lie with the NDA who, with its additional waste dumping directorate and behind the scenes work on the UK’s new-build programme, has strayed so far from its original remit of clean-up and decommissioning that it has become overstretched and impotent’.
By any standard, the failure-rate in setting and meeting annual targets for these facilities is strikingly high. Whilst the many factors that have the potential to affect performance (such as planned plant outages and the age of facilities etc) are widely recognised by CORE and others outside the industry, they seem of little consequence to the NDA whose transparently unrealistic forecasts appear to be geared more to consoling Government and placating frustrated customers than laying out the facts as they are – warts and all.
Martin Forwood concluded: ‘As a prime example, the much vaunted Sellafield Plan (and its subsequent Appendices), published by the NDA in 2011 at a cost to the taxpayer of £75,000, is strewn with this unwarranted operational optimism. To the casual observer or layperson, this and similar industry documents provide a wholly misleading picture of Sellafield’s performance and mask the full extent of decades of incompetence’. Note: i) the design throughput of the 49 year old Magnox reprocessing plant was initially 1500 tonnes per year but re-assessed in 2001 at 1000 tonnes per year. ii) the waste vitrification plant was designed to produce 600 cannisters of product per year via two production lines. Now with three production lines, the plant has yet to produce 500 cannisters or more per year.