The latest toxic progress on the great nuclear decommissioning mess

Posted: 12th December 2020

Just over two years ago this site carried a blog post with Byline Times on
one of the biggest and most incompetent contracts ever made in Whitehall by
the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.(NDA) The £6.2 billion contract to
the Texas company Cavendish Fluor Partnerships ended up in the courts where
it was successfully challenged by rivals Energy Solutions including Bechtel
who won £97m compensation on the grounds that the contract had been
awarded illegally. The contract was to clean up and make safe 10 ageing
Magnox nuclear power stations and two research facilities at enormous cost
to the taxpayer. It is part of a long term decommissioning programme which
will eventually cost the taxpayer a staggering £132 billion and not be
finally completed until 2140 long after anybody reading this ( and me) will
have died. Now two years on the National Audit Office and MPs on the Public
Accounts Committee have looked at what has happened. And the saga is
continuing with not altogether a pretty picture. And the final report was
held up by legal action from the NDA’s former senior management team. We
still have no final report nearly a year after the court decision
suggesting that wrangling is still continuing. As MPs on the public
accounts committee point out:”Implementing the recommendations of the
Holliday inquiry into the Magnox contract and the Department’s
‘Tailored Review’ of the role of the NDA will be critical and the
publication of these reports cannot come soon enough.”

Westminster Confidential 11th Dec 2020

https://davidhencke.com/2020/12/11/the-latest-toxic-progress-on-the-great-nuclear-decommissioning-mess/