£127M wasted on failed UK nuclear cleanup plan The center for the UK's nuclear industry wasted £127 million ($172 million) during delays and replanning as it scrambled to find alternatives for facilities which treat and repackage plutonium, a Parliamentary report found. In the face of a 2028 deadline to replace its 70-year-old analytical lab, Sellafield Limited, part of a …
That's what life's like when you've got a project with the combination of poor management, impossible budgets, never-really-been-there-before goals and high-level reviews from people who live by Homer's best saying of "it's easy to critcise and so much fun too". There comes a point where more money is spent trying to massage the figures to present a career-saving picture than actually do the work. I've worked on projects like this and I call it the "Live to fight another day" stage. On one of them we were "red teamed" by head office. They told us it was our last chance to get all the crap on the table and set a proper budget and plan that the whole company could get behind, but the first thing they did was to sack the engineering lead for telling them the company didn't have enough engineers with the right qualifications and experience to even allow him to have a go at an estimate to complete.You can imagine the impact it had on the rest of the team so we got a new unachievable budget and schedule and the beatings continued.
For all projects that are an uncharted territory and more so with poorly selected inexperienced team the first task should be to set out what has to be done to put together a best case and worse case estimate (an assumption of course that this team can actually do this with any credibility). This first task itself will have to be estimated for scope, cost and time but if this is also too hard then all hope is lost.
I had a project manager who used to work there... He told me they have a very high turnover of project managers at Sellafield, because the workers see it as a job for life and will sabotage any sensible effort to get the job finished, because when it is finished they will all be out of a job
Reading that gave me a flashback to a moment when I was asked if was interested in applying for the vacant position of Quality Manager at Sellafield. I wasn't in the nuclear sector but was building a good profile in another part of the energy sector. I gave it serious consideration (for at least 5 seconds) before declining the invitation. Apart from visions of holding a poisoned chalice, I never had ambitions of a management role - I'd already refused a promotion in my job and managed to see out my career as a freelancer (and not ruin my reputation). I eventually retired because a reduction in work meant I was taking it away from younger folk who actually needed it.
10 years retired and I've learnt that retirement means you give up two things: a regular income (albeit a blow softened by having invested in my pension), and being able to book time off!
"because the workers see it as a job for life and will sabotage any sensible effort to get the job finished, because when it is finished they will all be out of a job"
There were some people interviewed that were working on the Elizabeth line that rather enjoyed working on successive projects all around the world. The people above the average ditch digger often came from other large public construction projects and were excited to deliver the line as quickly as possible and move on to the next one or retire. Those sorts of attitudes need to be screened for upon hiring. People causing a job to slow down need to be pushed out. I'd think that it would be a feather in one's hat to say they worked on a team that finished a large project on-time and within budget (or really close).
Tsk.
Don't you know that if you don't use your budget it gets reduced in the next fiscal year because "you obviously don't need it"?
Imagine what that does to your reviews from the upper managers in your department.
It's almost as though your local council *doesn't* have a permanent moving road hole to show you how it all works.
Just like carers support direct payments - meant to allow you flexibility so you can use it dynamically and help you continue caring
Less than a decade later and I've been told by MULTIPLE managers that I WILL do the same exact things EVERY SINGLE WEEK and any money not spent will be reclaimed and if it's not done promptly then debt collectors will be involved.
Cue yearly reviews which have been enforcing harsher and harsher cuts every year for the last 5.
Tighter and tighter restrictions on a what you can be authorised for - last year someone I know with a frail wife who was a victim of violent crime was bluntly told without any consultation or discussion permitted that their 2 hours every other week gardener was no longer permitted and instead it would be the "restorative justice team" (read thugs, thieves, hooligans and other criminal detrius) who would be sent out and if he wasn't happy...tough shit and the manager in question opposed even this as too generous.
This coming from a dept who tried to cut 30% out of everyone's budgets claiming it was to pay for respite care for a select few, even got the local carers champion on board and it only got stopped as the oversight board started asking probing questions after carers started making a lot of noise about it.
Also said same dept says demand stable year on year, diverted large amounts from disability and carers support to....."restorative justice teams"
It all stinks to high hell and do politicians at any higher level do ANYTHING bar bleat about how were they to know a dept would do this? Do they take any action? Do they hell.....
It seems to me that nuclear energy, at least in its current form, is a waste of money and time. A power station is actively used for sixty years say (being generous), take 100 years or more to decommission - and many 10s or even 100s of thousands of years to deal with the waste. Even assuming no leakage or accident, how does that make sense?
So we have a choice. More renewables - which on a pound per watt basis make a lot of financial sense, but brings its own problems - not least the amount of space that (for example) solar panels take up on agricultural land, solar farms and so forth. Or… serious investment in ‘clean’ nuclear, built on existing sites. Advanced reactors which can burn waste, extracting every last drop of energy, and reduce the time required for the waste to decay to safe levels to mere hundreds of years.
Much of the costs for decommissioning at the moment seem to be associated with decommissioning structures from the 1950's to the 1970's which were not built with decommissioning in mind, and often seem to have followed practices with regard to waste management that were, shall we say, less than optimal.
The stuff we are building now will obviously still need to be decommissioned in the future, but there seems to be a general increase in awareness that we need to think about end of life when we actually design and build stuff (this is increasingly common in Civil Engineering in general - it's also increasingly common to see reference to buildings and structures being 'dismantled' rather than 'demolished').
While I admit I have no direct experience of design and construction of current nuclear reactors, I strongly suspect that 'the current form' is a lot better than the 'currently being decommissioned form'.
No doubt, though, there is still room for improvement.
I strongly suspect that 'the current form' is a lot better than the 'currently being decommissioned form'
I do hope so but given the nuclear industry's track record I find that extremely doubtful.
Remember, the shareholders don't pay for the decommissioning. By that time the company has been dissolved and the taxpayer picks up that bill for however many decades or centuries it takes.
"Remember, the shareholders don't pay for the decommissioning. By that time the company has been dissolved and the taxpayer picks up that bill for however many decades or centuries it takes."
incorrect - for exactly this reason we have the nuclear liablities fund, so current operators of the sites pay for the decomissioning while the site is active.
The new EPR reactors also can reuse some of the spent fuel from the AGR reactors to power themselves.
THE NLF is window dressing at best.
It only covers specific existing facilities.
Its funding doesn't even come close to covering the real costs of decommissioning those, let alone any new ones that might be built.
It is also largely controlled by the nuclear industry itself, in most part Electricité de France. Hardly an impartial overwatch.
"It seems to me that nuclear energy, at least in its current form, is a waste of money and time"
The Sellafield site is a contaminated mess not because of civil nuclear energy, but because of the government panic to produce weapons grade material as quickly as possible during the 1950s and 1960s, and sod the mess. The contamination and decommissioning problems stem from this military history, not so much the decommissioning of the (nominally civilian) Calder Hall Magnox units.
From an article about Calder Hall decommissioning from 2019.
> The NDA is overseeing work at the site, which is due to be fully decommissioned in 2120 at a cost of more than £70bn.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-49583192
According to this article the decommissioning process has another 95 years to run.
According to Wikipedia decommissioning of Calder Hall started in 2007 and the site will enter safe storage in 2027 (i.e. 20 years later). I presume that the safe storage phase covers the next 93 years.
I have ignored the fact that Calder Hall shut down in 2005.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calder_Hall_nuclear_power_station
If I understand things correctly decommissioning in "easy mode" takes over a century.
Just allowing for a century of inflation suggests that the final costs will be higher than the estimate of £70 billion from 6 years ago.
Please correct my errors.
That's the catchy name for "Remove the spent fuel, make the site safe, demolish ancillary buildings and wait for noticeably radioactive parts of the reactor complex to decay to the point where the rest can be demolished and recycled without contamination issues". I understand SafeStor is supposed to run for eighty years from the beginning of decommissioning, not the end of operations.
Prompt decommissioning supposedly costs about the same amount of money but it's carried out over a shorter timescale and with more chance of radioactive contamination escaping the containment building.
The Calder Hall reactor complex in particular is not going to cost £70 billion to decommission, that (now outdated) figure was for the entire Sellafield site which includes all of the nuclear weapons production waste and residues as well as the waste from the Magnox reprocessing lines on site. Decommissioning the civilian power reactors are not the reason for the pricetag you quoted.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-26124803 (from 2014, linked to from the 2019 BBC News report you quoted)
The Zion PWR in Illinois USA was shut down in 1998, decommissioning started in 2010 and completed in 2023 with the site no longer being licenced as a nuclear facility at the end of the process. This cost about a billion dollars in total. The single Magnox reactor at Tokai in Japan was decommissioned over a similar time period to the Zion PWR operation, no cost given.
I believe the fuel is still on site (or rather next to the old site) at Zion.
This was a PWR. If the reactor has run its life without ever splitting a fuel element then there should be no contamination. All you're dealing with is neutron bombarded water, steel and concrete. The water can be diluted but then the half life of irradiated water from a PWR/BWR is pretty short anyway. Steel is also not too bad when it comes to irradiation.
The British gas cooled reactors contain many thousands of tons of graphite. The irradiated graphite is a much bigger problem, which is why the safestore periods are a lot longer.
Now if there has been a fuel melt in the core.... well now you have all sorts other things to clean up. I know Chappelcross suffered a fuel melt. And there is of course the pile at Sellafield that caught fire and has a whole load of melted fuel. It really is far better to just leave them well alone.
Here is an interesting doc about how they removed the graphite from Tokai:
https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/ngwm-cd/PDF-Files/paper%208%20(Fuji).pdf
A nice example of Japanese efficiency! There had been a promise made to return the site to green field within a certain number of years after the reactor shutdown. I could not see that level of efficiency and neatness being done in the UK. :(
I was going to comment pretty much what you said. Given that much of the nuclear industrial/military stuff started at Windscale in the early fifties, including the first major nuclear incident (the graphite pile starting to burn because of the Wigner effect not being handled correctly - hence the hurried renaming of 'Windscale' to 'Sellafield'), and the British Nuclear Fuels Limited reprocessing plant (hey THORP! *waves*) being on the same site and having some... ahem... problems, the joint is seriously polluted.
If you look at other decommissioned nuclear installations in the UK (Harwell in Oxfordshire as a research site, Dounreay in Scotland, Hinkley Point in Somerset, Berkeley, Hunterston et al), the Windscale (Sellafield) site is a factor or a few worse than any of the others. Dounreay was arguably the second worst, given how radioactive material washed up on beaches not too far from that plant, whereas others were decommissioned without drama.
The US has quite a few 'superfund' sites dealing with the same problem. Oak Ridge in Tennessee is one of them, Hanford in Washington state being another. Both of them were Manhattan project sites.
A lot of the nastiest material from Dounreay gets shipped down the coast to Barrow, then taken by train under armed guard up to Sellafield. The same is true of waste from many other nuclear sites (although most of them don't have the sort of material which Dounreay does). Sellafield has the whole of the UK nuclear industry's crap to deal with, not just its own.
This is not the legacy of nuclear energy. This is the legacy of the UK's atomic and hydrogen bomb programme. It is a very different beast. A HUGE amount of mess left at Sellafield is the result of making plutonium and other bomb material. There was zero consideration for what they were going to do with the waste long term. A lot of the waste from the two air cooled piles was dumped into silos that had no way of being emptied.
It is a complete and utter shit-show for sure. Even the US managed to things more cleanly... just.
"It is a complete and utter shit-show for sure. Even the US managed to things more cleanly... just."
Not so much. There are contaminated sites all over the US from bomb making operations. The government is exempt from all of the radioactive pollution laws and environmental laws in general and act like it. Defunct military bases are massive clean up sites. Fuels leaked all over the place and used motor oil would just be dumped in the nearest pit to the motor pool. Solvents and other materials that were banned for civilian sale/use were still used in the military for ages as no one could be bothered to evaluate less toxic replacements or new methods.
The contamination from non radioactive materials is just horrific. And not just the US govt. What was the name of the town where they inadvertently sprayed dioxins on the dirt roads? Then there is the Love Canal, all the rivers polluted with PFOAs from Dupont, the towns covered in lead from mining... its a long list.
My father in law was in the USMC and some of the stories he tells are just incredible!
" What was the name of the town where they inadvertently sprayed dioxins on the dirt roads? "
It was a private company that was using some liquid waste as a fixative to semi-seal dirt roads by contract. IIRC, the waste wasn't classified as toxic, but the usage wasn't something that anybody had considered before. Left to decompose, it might have reacted its way to something fairly benign, but spayed on a surface in a thin layer that would get stirred up and blown around put it into the enviornment in its unhealthy condition.
different story: <https://www.waste360.com/hazardous-waste/the-mosaic-company-to-use-radioactive-waste-in-pilot-road-construction-project>
A quick search didn't turn up the story I recall.
Here's the wikipedia link:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Missouri>
Beat by an hour but worth doubling. This could be a poster child for allowing important things to be sub-contracted when they shouldn't. A company contracting to be the entity dealing with disposing of hazardous waste properly should not be able to engage another party to do the job for them. There's the danger of it being sub-contractors all the way down and it doesn't take too many layers before there isn't the money to do it properly.
I recall that. The whole mess that the Erin Brockovich movie is based on has a similar tinge. PG&E had to be dragged to court over their pollution of Hinckley in California.
And @blackcat, if you're shocked by that, you should read the book Silent Knights by Alan Diehl. Your father would be absolutely shocked to see how the US military covers up military accidents and incidents to preserve the reputations of certain people with influence.
It honestly blew my mind and it just adds to the many many tales of laissez-faire attitude that government departments/ministries have.
Just because someone else’s is as bad or worse doesn’t make yours OK, not even a little bit.
Nuclear energy, whether for power generation or city destruction, is a toxic mess - whichever way you look at it.
That’s one reason why it works as a deterrent to war, and it only barely works for that. As a means of generating power it’s completely inexcusable.
There on way making a habit of not building labs though 127 million - seems quite cheap compared to Deadly pathogen research hub remains unbuilt despite £400m spend (BBC)
"seems quite cheap compared to Deadly pathogen research hub remains unbuilt despite £400m spend (BBC)"
... and the politicians are banging on about how many jobs a new facility will bring in. Never mind that it's jobs being shifted from another location rather than created that not just anybody will be able to do. The headline needs to be more about having a modern facility to keep the public safe while gaining knowledge about dangerous pathogens that could impact human health on a large scale. It's not about "jobs".
>” The NDA expects the clean-up of the Sellafield site to go on until 2125 and cost £136 billion ($184 billion), an estimate which has increased nearly 19 percent since March 2019.”
Given the budget would have been set in 2018/2019 money. Total Inflation over that time (April 2019 to April 2025) is 27.7 percent. So without any further information, that headline figure needs to be taken with a large pinch of salt.
Take an imaginary number, multiply it by another imaginary number, then ask your third generation descendants what it has cost—so far.
It's a lovely technological exercise; but a financial black-hole—with huge efforts going into hiding that fact from the paying public, especially from that they pay at the meter.
O dear, the point being—which I am sure you are sensible enough to understand perfectly well—that 'the numbers' are irrelevant, it's the 'actual cost' two/three/four/... generations down the line that has any meaning.
In the present the politicians and money grubbers are desperate to kick the 'actual cost' can down the road and leave it to those later generations to deal with. Those numbers are not 'imaginary', or 'make believe', and someone has to pay.
Oh, look, £14B of national treasure ponied up for 'Sizewell C'.
Who in their tiny little right-thinking mind believes for one moment that that figure is in any way remotely in touch with what will be the actual cost of construction, let alone in contact with the reality of the overall cost of creating, running, decommissioning and final safe disposal of everything that constitutes 'Sizewell C'?
It's a scam, with added vain political posturing. Yes, it will, probably, eventually generate quite a lot of power for a few years. That's about all we can say. The rest of it is just a game of buck-passing, while certain entities parasitise the national common weal.
Nothing remotely new in that, but the dishonesty of it is a shame.
I just cannot comprehend how these projects cost so much and take so long. The WHOLE point of the EPR is economy of scale and there is nothing of the such.
I do wonder who is getting their pockets lined with these huge projects. HS2, lower Thames crossing etc.
"I just cannot comprehend how these projects cost so much and take so long. "
Mostly, it seems to be the planning process.
We had a similar discussion a couple of months ago, and I noted that the planning process for Lower Thames Crossing had hit £1 Billion (with a B)
Costs for the Stonehenge tunnel have already hit £166 million, with no sign of construction actually starting:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4ng8l2lnpdo#:~:text=A%20two-mile%20road%20tunnel%20past%20Stonehenge%20could%20cost,challenges%20from%20Save%20Stonehenge%20World%20Heritage%20Site%20%28SSWHS%29.
Every project (of this sort of size) requires a planning enquiry.
Multiple studies will be required, to provide data directly for design and construction, but also to check on the impact on archaeology, ecology and habitat, air quality, noise and nuisance to nearby inhabitants, etc. Nowadays, there will also need to be an assessment of the carbon footprint, and proof that the project doesn't fall foul of net zero legislation.
Every project will have its opponents, some NIMBY's who don't object to the project, but just don't want it 'here', others who object to the nature of the project ("it should be a tunnel not a bridge") or object to the very fact of the project ("we shouldn't build a bridge because we should be reducing our travel not encouraging it").
And because we are a democracy, everyone gets there say.
And everyone tries to exploit any and every law or regulation that helps their case, so that gets lawyers involved (and their fees can tend to get very high. very quickly).
And now every study that was done needs to be re-done, to answer the questions that the protestors raised - which, if the process is not tightly controlled, leads to new questions, and then further studies.
And suddenly, you've been bogged down in the planning process for 2, 3, 5 years, and spent millions/hundreds of million, a billion pounds.
And built nothing.
There needs to be some control on what is built and how, but in the UK, it does seem that we now value the planning process more than the finished structure.
Being arms length public sector, wage caps don't really apply at Sellafield. There are tales of people doing fairly low skilled jobs such as laundry workers earning high wages, incredibly poor performance, jobs being pushed into overtime, poor attendance and high rates of work being contracted out to chains of contractors all adding their own cut for doing nothing but sub-contracting yet again...
It's a money pit, we all know it's a money pit, but nobody wants to do anything about it because why kill the golden goose? When it's finished, West Cumbria has nothing else going for it, and simply wont be a viable area to live in.
It’s similar with HS2. Getting people (cleaners,caterers etc.) to work in the relatively inaccessible locations, means both they get a premium wage and HS2 has to provide transport etc.
Don’t blame the workers for grabbing the money; it’s exactly what the fat cats, Tory sponsors and “investors” are doing.
"It’s similar with HS2. Getting people (cleaners,caterers etc.) to work in the relatively inaccessible locations, means both they get a premium wage and HS2 has to provide transport etc."
To have those inaccessible locations is bonkers. A good lesson in the size of the Earth is to drive across the US. There are refueling oasis' along stretches of highway that are miles from anything. Behind them is a small mobile home park where the people that own and work at them live (and do lots of drugs, apparently). Many of those places have gone out of business as newer cars that can go further on a tank of petrol have replaced the giant land yachts. They might come back to some extent to service EV's with a big solar field adjacent to the chargers and an outrageously expensive snack shop. These are the necessary depots. For a train, it would make no sense to plant a station in such a place.
I use the California HSR project as an example a lot since I've been keeping an eye on it as how not to do it. They've had the same YIMBY problems as there have been in other place. Local cities along the route want a piece of the action so the require a station to play nice with the project. A high speed train that has to stop every 50 miles is not going to be high speed. There's already a route that also doesn't connect by train to Los Angeles (2hr bus from LA to Bakersfield). It could benefit from dedicated tracks and fewer level crossings to speed up the service. The newly renamed "Gold Runner" line is owned by the state and operated by Amtrak. Of course it had to be renamed at a cost of millions since "San Joaquins" (for the San Joaquin valley) is far too racist (or something). The HSR could be an express that only has two or three intermediate stops between LA and SF that share a station or are close enough to join with an automated tram to the existing service that can feed in and out of it.
Secure parking is still an issue. I was planning a trip via train and hoped I could use a closer station, but it didn't have secure long term parking (a week/10 days). I was also running into the common problem of the train being sold out of rooms nearly all summer. I'd have to call the booking number to see if there were any dates with rooms still left before October. It seems that politicians don't see how popular taking the train has become. One can get somewhere faster by plane and get a free groping thrown in, but if you have a week, that doesn't mean a friend of family has a week too they can take off work. The journey becomes the primary goal and spending 2-3 days with somebody is just a piece of the holiday. The people I would visit would book a day or two off of work, but not necessarily a week as that would impact their holiday plans.
I worked at Sellafield on and off for 20 years. What I can say is:
* For every 2 people trying to help you get the job done safely, properly and efficiently there are half a dozen trying to stop you.
* The beaucracy is both labyrinthine and Byzantine;
* On a good day at site I would manage 5 hours actual work. Even with my site pass it would often take up to 2 hours just to get to my work area. Sellafield personnel would often disappear in the early afternoon thus stopping the job. They would refuse to work out of their contract hours or change their work times to facilitate us getting the job done. On more than one occasion I have been told to leave site and come back the next day at lunchtime as the people I was supposed to be working with were going home.
* There are a lot of people working there who think Sellafield owes them a living. But there is no other major employer in the area.
* A lot of the issues stem from the 1960s and 60s weapons program. The Wiki entry doesn't tell the whole truth about the reactor fire!
* In the 1970s during the miners' strike we were burning through Magnox fuel rods at a rate of knots. The waste from these was dumped into a total of 22 huge concrete silos filled with water with no thought for recovery and final disposal of the waste. That's one of the big and expensive programs. The technical challenges are huge and complex.
* The existing lab building in question is a rabbit warren of corridors and small laboratories with systems that have been upgraded in a piecemeal manner. There is historical low-level contamination in the building and hence when demolished the waste will need to be stored properly.
* Having had dealings with the NDA, I have little faith in the technical ability of SOME of their inspectors.
Thankfully I no longer have to work for them as it was the most frustrating customer I've ever worked with in my 44 year career.
So many big projects I'm seeing get mired in planning. The project needs to be done. It will be done, but everybody is trying to CYA by stretching it out so they can confidently say they've considered every contingency. Most projects have big swaths of things that can start immediately and a number of fiddly bits that will take time to plan and coordinate. Even if it might mean having to scrap some parts that need to be realigned, it might be cheaper and always faster to do that than spend money on consultants and studies to come up with an ideal solution that will turn out flawed anyway. The world won't end if the road bed was graded a meter too wide. It is a problem that the whole project was delayed a half decade to make sure the grading was figured to the cm.
Poor UK, they are failing because they are following the same business formula as America.
This project is full of self proclaimed experts, who give each other long fancy titles, but havent got a fucking clue about the most aspects of the project they are "leading".
So many "leaders" so many "experts"...and thats why the money continues to disappear and they complete almost nothing.
“It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age.”
- L Strauss 1954
While all the talking is being done, sea levels will rise, and eventually all of, or most nuclear facilities will be under water!!’
Water is an excellent radiation barrier, so providing we can secure the sites, so that nothing nasty can enter the ocean, problem sorted.!!’
It just takes time, was this the hidden, hideously stupid plan all along???
Only time will tell, and it’s got to be a better plan than digging deep holes, to move and put all that contaminated material in, and it will cost less too, it’s a win win situation, but where’s the money in that??
To finish all I can say is; “Nuclear power is one hell of a way to boil water!!!”
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