June 30, 2014

UK?s NDA Providing ?50 Million More to Dounreay Site Due to Added Scope

By ExchangeMonitor

The U.K.’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority is providing an extra £50 million ($86 million) in the next two years to cleanup work at the Dounreay site due to scope that was added after the contract was awarded in 2012, the NDA announced yesterday. While plans for spent fuel at Dounreay originally called for storing the fuel on site, it is now slated for transfer to Sellafield. “The total cost of this additional scope is not yet known but will be several hundred million pounds,” the NDA said in a release yesterday. It also adds: “Significant additional contract scope, acknowledged at the time of the competition but insufficiently mature to be included in the bidding process, is now being developed to a level of detail such that it can progressively be introduced to the programme.”

Cleanup at Dounreay, a fast reactor site in northern Scotland, is being conducted by The Babcock Dounreay Partnership, a team including Babcock, URS and CH2M Hill. An extra £10 million ($17 million) was allocated to the effort this year, while the £50 million will be allocated in 2014/15 and 2015/16, according to the NDA. “This additional funding will assist DSRL in the near term as it works through the longer term implications of accommodating this further scope within the planned assured funding arrangements that exist for the site. The details of this approach will now be worked on over the next few months as detailed cost and scheduling implications are worked through and implemented through a rigorous formal change control process,” the NDA said.

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