Rumours that costs of Sellafield’s already delayed Evaporator D project had risen above the £400M figure were admitted by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) at a meeting of the West Cumbria Sites Stakeholder Group (WCSSG) yesterday 6th November. In response to a question from CORE (Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment), the NDA confirmed that the cost of the project had now risen to £643M.
Designed to reduce the volume of liquid High Level Wastes produced by Sellafield’s Magnox and THORP reprocessing plant, Evaporator D was estimated to cost £90M in 2006. By 2009 the cost had risen to £297 and in 2010 was confirmed by the NDA as having reached £400M. Described as the UK’s largest nuclear project, Evaporator D is to be installed alongside the site’s existing but increasingly unreliable evaporators (A,B & C). Its original remit was to help ensure that the two reprocessing plant would complete reprocessing schedules by their projected plant closure dates (Magnox in 2016/17 and THORP in 2018).
Adding insult to injury, Sellafield Ltd also confirmed to the WCSSG yesterday that assembly of the dozen or so modules that will make up the Evaporator is not now expected to be completed on site until early 2016 – two years later than projected in the much vaunted Sellafield Performance Plan published by the NDA just 18 months ago. Allowing for a further period of two years for the active commissioning of the new facility, Evaporator D is unlikely to be in full operation until 2018 at the earliest – after the two reprocessing plant have closed.
CORE’s spokesman Martin Forwood said today:
“However the NDA may dress it up, Evaporator D has completely missed the reprocessing boat for which it was originally intended. Even for the nuclear industry, this is project mismanagement at its very worst, and given the vast sums of taxpayer money already pumped into this hopeless project, the NDA and Sellafield are rightly castigated by the National Audit Office in their report published today”.