If anyone doubted the nuclear industry’s ability to underestimate the costs and timescales of new projects, they need look no further than Sellafield and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA). The current attempt to equip the site with a new Evaporator for condensing the dangerous liquid high level wastes (HLW) produced by Sellafield’s unnecessary reprocessing operations is a prime example.
The Evaporator D Project, labelled as the UK’s largest nuclear project, was launched in 2006 as a means of supplementing the site’s three existing evaporators. The Project was originally priced at £90M and scheduled to come into service in 2010/11. When the contract was awarded to Costain in 2009, the cost had escalated to £297M – with a four-year delay flagged-up. By 2010, the ‘politically sensitive’ Project costs had jumped to some £400M and, as New Year 2012 unfolds, a further £80M-£100M is understood to be required.
Not for the first time, a ‘cap in hand’ approach for the additional finance is likely to be made by the NDA to Government. If secured, Project costs will have ballooned to around £½Bn of taxpayers’ money. An independent review of the spiralling costs and inept management of the Project is now expected to be held and questions raised about the NDA’s devotion to reprocessing which, as a waste and discharge producing operation, is wholly contrary to its clean-up and decommissioning remit.
CORE’s spokesman Martin Forwood said today:
“What amounts to a 550% hike in the overall costs of Evaporator D will rank alongside the cream of the industry’s catalogue of procurement and management blunders. The NDA has well and truly painted itself into a corner, at taxpayers’ expense, on a project that cannot now be scrapped – because too much has already been sunk into it, yet will struggle to serve the purpose it was originally designed for – securing the currently scheduled end of reprocessing. With the Project now mired in chaos and controversy, the NDA is going to have to eat humble pie and consider abandoning some of its reprocessing plans”.
Whilst the Evaporator D Project was quoted as being ’at risk’ by the NDA in Autumn 2010, the current shortfall in funding and prospect of further delay was only announced by the NDA to a sub-committee of Sellafield’s local West Cumbria Sites Stakeholder Group (WCSSG) on 13th December 2011. Though the NDA’s Sellafield Plan, published in August 2011, still shows Evaporator D being brought on line for active service commissioning in 2014/15, delays to this timeline are now inevitable with serious consequences for reprocessing timetables.
The need for Evaporator D, designed to ‘play a pivotal role in the delivery of nuclear fuel reprocessing contracts’, has arisen as a result of the routine failure of the site’s current suite of evaporators A & B and C to cope with the HLW arising from reprocessing operations. Limited by varying levels of internal corrosion, the combined underperformance of these ageing and unreliable evaporators has for some years posed clear risks to reprocessing schedules, particularly the completion of THORP’s overseas contracts which amount to some 400 tonnes and which are already years behind schedule.
The importance of Evaporator D in mitigating these risks and preventing regulatory safety standards from being undermined was raised by British Nuclear Fuels plc (BNFL) in its planning application for the new Evaporator in 2006 with the warning that ‘if additional evaporative capacity is not provided then it may not be able to complete existing reprocessing contracts for commitments already made’. More recently it was highlighted in the NDA’s Oxide Fuels Credible Options paper (November 2011) which warned that meeting reprocessing plant closure dates was wholly dependent on the site’s existing support facilities working properly and the arrival on schedule of Evaporator D. Anything less would require further options to be considered by the NDA.
Martin Forwood further commented:
“ With the scandal of £1Bn plus of taxpayers’ money already lost on the Sellafield MOX Plant, this squandering of a further £1/2Bn from the public purse to prop up a dysfunctional nuclear industry – at the expense of funding nurses’ salaries, hospitals and other worthwhile causes that the UK actually needs – will rightly be widely condemned”.
Notes for Editors:
NDA. This latest raid on the public purse is additional to the £250M required by the NDA to compensate for the 17.5% fall income and £80M rise in expenditure forecast in its Draft Business Plan 2012/15. (see Guardian article 25/12/11)
Evaporator D. The contract for Evaporator D, awarded to Costain in 2009, covers full engineering, procurement, construction and inactive commissioning of the Evaporator. The Evaporator is being built at Interserve’s factory at Ellesmere Port and consists of 11 modules – the largest weighing 500 tonnes and measuring 12.5 x 7.5 x 27 metres tall. Because of the logistical difficulties in transporting the large modules by road, they are being shipped by sea to Sellafield and transferred on site for assembly alongside the existing HLW complex. Modifications to Sellafield beach and sandunes have had to be made been and a new bridge built over the local River Ehen. Alterations to road systems and structures on and off site have also had to be made. The contract for the transport and shipping element of the modules’ delivery was awarded to Mammoet UK Ltd and the first two modules were delivered by the barge Terra Marique in June 2011.