The £136bn clean-up operation of the Sellafield nuclear site, including the building judged the UK’s most hazardous, is not making progress fast enough, MPs have warned.
Work decommissioning the former nuclear plant is behind schedule due to “failure, cost overruns and continuing safety concerns”, a report by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said.
One building at the site in Cumbria has been leaking radioactive water into the ground since 2018, at a rate that would be enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool roughly every three years, the committee said.
MPs said Sellafield ltd – the company owned by the government and tasked with delivering the clean up safely – has a history of poor performance in delivering major projects such as new buildings to store waste or make it safe.
Large cost increases and delays in the overal project occurred “all too frequently,” the report says and despite signs of more “recent improvement – given Sellafield’s track record, we are yet to be fully convinced that this is not another false dawn”.
It said reasons to be sceptical included Sellafield poor management of the refurbishment of an onsite lab so it could continue analysing waste samples – vital for safety.
The report found this “very poorly managed and now-paused project has seen £127m wasted”. The failure, MPs said, “resulted from a lack of understanding of what physical state its labs were in, and from not doing the right remedial work to address their deterioration. At the point work on the lab was paused, the forecast cost had risen by £820m, and the project was five years delayed.
While noting there were “signs of improvement”, Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the PAC chair, said Sellafield continued to present “intolerable risks”.
“As with the fight against climate change, the sheer scale of the hundred-year timeframe of the decommissioning project makes it hard to grasp the immediacy of safety hazards and cost overruns that delays can have.
“Every day at Sellafield is a race against time to complete works before buildings reach the end of their life. Our report contains too many signs that this is a race that Sellafield risks losing,” he said.
The PAC said the Magnox Swarf Storage Silo (MSSS), described by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), the agency responsible for the clean-up of the UK’s civil nuclear power programme safely, as “the most hazardous building in the UK”, is likely to continue leaking until the oldest section of the building has been finally emptied in the 2050s.
This is nearly 10 years later than previously expect.
A consequence of Sellafield Ltd, the site’s operators, missing most of its annual targets for retrieving waste, meant the buildings “are likely to remain extremely hazardous for longer”.
Sellafield stopped nuclear power generation in 2003 and, in addition to work cleaning up the site, now processes and stores nuclear waste from power plants around the UK.
The MPs found a “growing backlog of maintenance tasks that need to be performed” with “worrying implications for safety”. It found malfunctioning equipment has limited Sellafield Ltd’s ability to retrieve waste from its oldest facilities, “while its safety experts have warned the deteriorating condition of assets is making the site increasingly unsafe.”
The Government ultimately plans to store the waste in an underground geological disposal facility (GDF) for the thousands of years it will take for the radioactive material to become safe.
Two sites are being considered in Cumbria and Lincolnshire but MPs say the Lincolnshire location is reportedly set to withdraw.
MPs found the date for the GDF has already slipped from 2040 to the late 2050s, “with every decade of delay meaning Sellafield could need to construct another storage building, each costing £500m-£760m.”
The committee said the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero is not doing enough to ensure that long–term value for money from decommissioning the Sellafield site.
They said the cost of decommissioning Sellafield continues to grow – even as billions are spent on the site every year. It said a government imposed squeeze on the NDA’s budget “will mean more work slips into future years, increasing the long–term cost to the taxpayer.”
NDA chief executive David Peattie welcomed the PAC’s scrutiny and said the authority would consider how best to address its recommendations. “We take the findings seriously and the safety of the site and the wellbeing of our people will always be our highest priorities,” he said.
A spokesperson for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said: “We expect the highest standards of safety and security as former nuclear sites are dismantled, and the regulator is clear that public safety is not compromised at Sellafield.
“We continue to support the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority in its oversight of Sellafield, while driving value for money.”
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