UK NDA to take over Magnox Ltd

4 July 2018


The UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) on 2 July announced that Magnox Ltd, which manages 12 nuclear sites, is to become its subsidiary in 2019.  Magnox Ltd is responsible for 10 former Magnox nuclear plants, two nuclear research sites and a hydroelectric plant. 

The UK government decided in March 2017 to cut short NDA’s 14-year contract with Cavendish Fluor Partnership to decommission the Magnox sites. The contract, which was awarded in 2014 to the partnership between the UK’s Cavendish Nuclear and US company Fluor, will now end on 1 September 2019. The government is effectively taking the £6.2bn contract back into public ownership, following mismanagement of the tender to the private sector, which led to legal action by the two US companies that lost out, resulting in payment of £122m in compensation. This means that about 85% of UK nuclear cleanup activities is under public control, after NDA’s earlier takeover of the Sellafield storage and reprocessing site.


NDA CEO David Peattie said the latest decision marked a new approach to managing the Magnox 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”. 

Peattie said that NDA would continue to work together with Cavendish-Fluor “to ensure a smooth transition to the new arrangements”. 

He assured staff that the change would result in “more efficient decommissioning”. Unions are seeking talks with the new management for assurances over pay and conditions. Unite union’s acting national officer for energy Peter McIntosh said the decision was “long overdue” and that the 2014 contract “should not have been awarded to any organisation”.

Earlier, the UK Public Accounts Committee (PAC) strongly criticised the NDA and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy over the handling and oversight of the contract. It said NDA “ran an overly complex procurement process, resulting in it awarding the contract to the wrong bidder, and subsequently settling legal claims from a losing consortium”. It added  NDA had “drastically under-estimated” the scale of the work needed to decommission the Magnox sites. PAC in June announced an inquiry into the NDA’s work at Sellafield, which is forecast to be GBP913m over budget and facing delays. An independent inquiry examining the Magnox contract is also underway.
 



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