Claims made by local group CORE in March – hotly denied at the time by BNFL – that delays in commissioning the Sellafield MOX Plant (SMP) may have lost the company some contracts, have been vindicated by a recent BNFL admission to the industry’s journal Nuclear Fuel.
Having failed to meet the delivery date for SMP’s first consignment of MOX fuel for Switzerland and being forced to ‘re-arrange’ its contracts for other European customers because of delays, BNFL has now confirmed to Nuclear Fuel (21st July 2003) that the company has had to subcontract a further order because of SMP’s continuing slow progress. This implies that more than one order has had to be subcontracted.
This lost business, for European customers, is thought to have been taken on by BNFL’s French competitor COGEMA. Refusing to give any detail of the contracts, BNFL has inferred that the lost business is nothing more than a ‘book-transfer’ that can be made good at a later date.
CORE spokesperson Martin Forwood said today
“ BNFL can call it what they like, but the humiliating handing-over of a MOX order to their arch-rival is a lost contract in anyone’s book “
CORE’s original claims about SMP’s contract troubles were largely founded on British Government evidence to the International Tribunal of the Sea in Hamburg in November 2001. Then defending SMP against an Irish Government challenge, the UK government went to great lengths to impress the Tribunal that delays in commissioning SMP could lead to the loss of several contracts, with as much as £20M being wiped off the plant’s order book.>br>
CORE added:-
“ Ignoring BNFL’s use of voodoo economics for SMP, the plant was a loss-maker from the day it was built. The continuing delays in getting it up and running, the re-arranged and sub-contracted business all point to a total financial disaster for the company “.