A United Kingdom House of Commons committee on Wednesday lambasted the government’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority for its handling of an expensive contract for nuclear-reactor decommissioning that is being canceled early following an expensive legal challenge.
An excessively complicated contract process led to selection of the “wrong bidder,” Cavendish Fluor Partnership, and then to a roughly £100 million payout to two losing bidders and a nine-year curtailment of the contract, the Public Accounts Committee said. “Not only did this disrupt an important component of vital nuclear decommissioning work, but it also cost the taxpayer upwards of £122 million,” according to its report.
The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, the nondepartmental agency tasked with cleanup of retired U.K. nuclear sites, in 2014 awarded a contract covering £3.8 billion of work in decommissioning 10 Magnox reactor plants and two research facilities.
Things went downhill from there. Cavendish Fluor Partnership determined it would actually cost £6 billion to fulfill its decommissioning commitments. Losing U.S. bidders EnergySolutions and Bechtel, which had teamed as Reactor Site Solutions, sued separately and received £97.5 million after the British High Court determined NDA had “fudged” the procurement process to keep Cavendish Fluor in contention. In March 2017, NDA said it would suspend the contract in September 2019 rather than the original 2028 date.
Among the NDA’s failures, according to the report: creating a bidder evaluation process with more than 700 criteria, then tweaking Cavendish Fluor’s score to ensure it would not be cut out of consideration; being unable to account for £500 million of the £2.2 billion cost spike for the contract; and possibly paying the prior Magnox cleanup contractor, EnergySolutions, for work that was not conducted.
An independent inquiry of the contract was initiated last year, with findings expected in 2018.
“We will study the Committee’s recommendations and those to come from the Holliday Inquiry, and have already taken significant steps to address the issues arising from the Magnox competition and contract,” NDA said in a statement Wednesday. “We are committed to learning from the mistakes made, implement any necessary improvements and continue to focus on the important work of cleaning up the UK’s nuclear legacy.”
