The United Kingdom’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority last week formally assumed management of the company that is decommissioning the nation’s Magnox reactors.
Magnox Ltd. shifted just before midnight on Aug. 31 from the privately operated Cavendish Fluor Partnership to the nondepartmental executive agency of the U.K. government.
“This is a very exciting time for Magnox,” new CEO Gwen Parry-Jones said in a press release Monday. “We have some fantastic talented people and being an NDA subsidiary gives us more opportunities to work closely as part of the NDA group, share ideas and take a more flexible approach to decommissioning the UK’s first generation of nuclear power stations.”
The move is in line with NDA’s assumption of management in 2016 of Sellafield Ltd., the until-then privately managed firm that operated the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing and cleanup site in Cumbria.
“Under a subsidiary model it is easier for both parties to make changes to the scope of work or approach to be followed since there is not a contractually binding work package which would need to be modified by the contractual change control process with all its formalities, review periods and requirements for underpinning,” NDA spokesman Daniel Gould said by email Tuesday.
The U.K. government announced in 2017 that it would cancel Cavendish Fluor Partnership’s contract to run Magnox Ltd., nine years before it was scheduled to expire. The change was necessary, NDA said at the time, because the scope of work in decommissioning 10 Magnox power plants and two research sites had grown beyond what four corporate teams had bid on ahead of the 2014 award.
However, the NDA also paid out £97.5 million to settle separate lawsuits from U.S.-based EnergySolutions and Bechtel, which had unsuccessfully partnered to seek the Magnox contract. That came after the U.K. High Court found in 2016, in considering the EnergySolutions lawsuit, that NDA had “manipulated” the contract decision to keep Cavendish Fluor in consideration.
The U.K. National Audit Office in 2017 said the procurement process cost taxpayers £122 million. It knocked the government’s handling of the award, saying among other things it had an insufficient understanding of the state of decommissioning of the Magnox sites.
An independent inquiry of the acquisition wrapped up by 2018, Sky News reported in January. But the final document has not been released in the face of objections from the NDA’s former chairman and chief executive, according to the report.
The government then announced last year that the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority would take over Magnox Ltd. Parry-Jones, an executive with U.K. power companies, was announced as incoming Magnox Ltd. CEO in March.
In total, NDA has put in a new executive management team of 35 positions, with 29 recruited so far, Gould stated by email. The total Magnox Ltd. workforce is roughly 3,400 people.
Magnox Ltd.’s planned cost for the 2019-2020 budget year, which began in April, is £475 million. Cleanup continues at 11 locations, with the Bradwell plant in “care and maintenance.”
Calder Hall Plant Defueled
Separately, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority said Tuesday it had completed defueling of the Calder Hall power plant at Sellafield.
The facility, which operated from 1956 to 2003, was the first-ever nuclear power plant to be tied to a national grid, according to NDA. Its four reactors generated 38,953 used fuel rods.
Defueling was initiated in 2011. The fuel roads were extracted and placed into shielded containers for transfer to the Fuel Handling Plant at Sellafield, according to an NDA press release. The rods were then cooled in a storage pool for eventual reprocessing at Sellafield’s Magnox Reprocessing Plant to reclaim still-usable uranium and plutonium.
All structures at Calder Hall except for the four reactor buildings are due to be removed by 2027.
“Following the completion of defueling, post-operational clean-out of the buildings will be carried out to remove any remaining nuclear or radiological hazard,” Gould stated. “Calder Hall will then be placed into an interim state known as ‘care and maintenance’ before the reactor buildings are dismantled, leaving only the concrete bio-shield containing the reactor core.”
