Cavendish Fluor Partnership will continue to run the contract until September next year when a Magnox subsidiary will be created along similar lines to Sellafield Ltd, the group responsible for the nuclear site in Cumbria. A spokesperson for the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said: “This decision will deliver value for money for taxpayers as well as accelerate the decommissioning process. A similar arrangement at Sellafield has enabled significant recent progress on the ground.” The NDA took control of Sellafield in 2016 after stripping a US-led consortium, Nuclear Management Partners, of a £9bn contract. David Peattie, chief executive of the NDA, said: “This decision marks a new approach to managing the 12 Magn ox sites but is consistent with a similar change we made at Sellafield in 2016, where the simplified approach is resulting in more efficient decommissioning progress. “In line with a recent change to the way Sellafield (the NDA’s largest and most complex site) is managed, expertise from the private sector will be engaged through multiple smaller contracts – rather than through a single large parent body organisation (PBO).”
FT 2nd July 2018 read more »
The Nuclear Free Local Authorities (NFLA) welcomes the decision, approved by the UK Government, which will see the control and operation of the Magnox nuclear sites being currently decommissioned transfer from Cavendish Fluor to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA). This new contract would begin on September 1st. For NFLA, this is a sensible and pragmatic policy but it comes after a series of alarming and costly failings that could, and should, have been avoided. The decision follows on from an expensive court case brought against the NDA’s contracting process of the Magnox sites by Energy Solutions and Bechtel, who were unsuccessful in the original competitive tender. This lead the NDA to have to pay at least £122 million in compensation and legal fees to them. Cavendish Fluor also requested for its contract to clean-up the Magnox sites to be ended earlier, which has led to the present decision of the NDA in bringing it back ‘in house’. This is not the first time such problems have occurred, given that the NDA previously took the management of the Sellafield site back ‘in house’ over concerns that the private contractor NMP was not delivering this contract effectively.
NFLA 3rd July 2018 read more »
Magnox Limited – operator of former Magnox nuclear power plant sites in the UK – will become a subsidiary of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) from September 2019. Last year, NDA decided to terminate its contract with Magnox Ltd for managing the sites.
World Nuclear News 3rd July 2018 read more »
