Sellafield not achieving value for money, says public auditor
Ongoing concerns over project management, the pace of delivery and staffing at the Sellafield nuclear site in Cumbria mean it is not yet achieving value for money, according to a new report from the UK's National Audit Office.
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The National Audit Office scrutinises public spending for Parliament and is independent of government. The report, Decommissioning Sellafield: managing risks from the nuclear legacy, is an update to its previous report in 2018.
The Sellafield site - which houses more than 1000 buildings - is the largest nuclear complex in Western Europe. Sellafield's nuclear facilities include those connected with the Magnox reprocessing programme, the Sellafield mixed-oxide fuel plant, the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant, and nuclear waste treatment plants. It is also home to redundant facilities from defence work in the 1950s, which included making plutonium for nuclear weapons.
The UK government considers that some of the facilities at Sellafield pose an "intolerable" risk and that risk reduction must be the overriding factor in the decision-making of the public body in charge of the site, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA). The NDA is currently responsible for operating, decommissioning and cleaning up a total of 17 nuclear sites in the UK. Seven more sites are due to be added to its remit.
The NDA expects full site remediation at Sellafield will take until 2125, while the forecast cost of decommissioning the site has risen to GBP136 billion (USD176 billion). The NDA spent GBP2.7 billion at Sellafield in 2023-24, while the site earned GBP0.8 billion in income in the same year.
The National Audit Office said Sellafield and the NDA have made progress on numerous fronts since it last reported on the site in 2018. For the first time, Sellafield safely removed certain types of hazardous waste, including in March this year removing a zeolite skip, used to absorb radiation, from the First Generation Magnox Storage Pond (FGMSP).
Separately, the NDA has reorganised itself to address significant contractual, delivery and procurement problems. Historically, it had contracted out management of nuclear sites to the private sector. The NDA began reversing this trend in 2016 – starting with Sellafield. From 2018-2023, it created a group subsidiary management structure, allowing it to seek savings through economies of scale and improve operational effectiveness, via sharing staff between sites.
"Despite Sellafield demonstrating that it can safely remove the most hazardous material from ageing buildings ... progress isn't quick enough for it to be able to guarantee that facilities used to treat the waste will reach the end of their useful lives before all the waste is retrieved," the National Audit Office said.
Compared with 2018, milestones for substantially emptying three of the legacy ponds and silos have been pushed back by between six and 13 years. Sellafield is hoping to significantly accelerate the pace of retrievals; in the most optimistic scenario, by the mid-2030s it will be retrieving 546 boxes of waste from the Magnox Swarf Storage Silo (MSSS) each year (24 times as much as it did in 2023-24).
Separately, four of the major projects the National Audit Office last reported on in 2018 (and which had started construction), are expected to cost GBP1.15 billion more and be delivered 58-129 months later than previously forecast. Major projects started more recently are currently in line with their business cases, with one notable exception that is vital to the safe and effective running of the site. This involves Sellafield's sample analysis facilities, which are 70 years old and said to be in extremely poor condition.
The National Audit Office noted that staffing challenges remain, and Sellafield is developing a workforce plan to address issues which have affected operations in recent years.
The report includes recommendations to Sellafield, the NDA and the government for progressing decommissioning projects at Sellafield and attaining value for money.
"The NDA needs to build new facilities to treat and store different types of nuclear waste, while maintaining ageing facilities and associated infrastructure until they can be decommissioned," said Gareth Davies, head of the National Audit Office. "Despite progress achieved since the NAO last reported, I cannot conclude Sellafield is achieving value for money yet, as large projects are being delivered later than planned and at higher cost, alongside slower progress in reducing multiple risks.
"Continued under-performance will mean the cost of decommissioning will increase considerably, and 'intolerable risks' will persist for longer."
