Dounreay clean-up costs 'capped for 15 years'

Published on Tuesday 26 January 2010 19:30

FIRMS bidding for the contact to clean up the Dounreay nuclear site have been told the budget will be capped at £150 million a year for a planned 15 years.

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) made the announcement yesterday ahead of a competition to return the Caithness complex to a near greenfield site by 2025.

Firms will compete for ownership of Dounreay Site Restoration Ltd (DSRL), the company licensed to carry out the work. The successful bidder will take over DSRL in 2012 and complete the clean-up.

Funding was expected to peak at 200m a year through 2011-15, to cover major construction projects, including cleaning the notorious waste shaft, and the reduction means some work may have to be deferred.

However, the award is still seen as a good outcome in the face of cuts in public spending.

Randall Bargelt, the NDA's Dounreay site director, said the funding package would maintain the momentum of decommissioning and retain the strong pool of skills at Dounreay.

He added: "It is important to all of us to achieve the best possible outcome for Dounreay through the competition process. And the fact that we can now present a stable, attractive, package to potential bidders is really good news, particularly in the current financial climate."

Simon Middlemas, managing director of DSRL, described it is a "very good outcome in a very tough climate for public funds".

He added: "The assurance of funding up to 150m is a good platform on which to plan a stable forward programme of work. It is an opportunity to continue the significant reduction in hazards already achieved."

All operations at the 140-acre site came to an end between 1994 and 2004. In the late 1990s it was thought the clean up would take 100 years. In 2000, a site restoration plan predicted decommissioning would be completed by 2063. The current end date is 2025, but competition is expected to throw up a new date based on what the government can afford.

One of the most advanced decommissioning projects in the UK is at Winfrith in Dorset, built in the 1950s and which once had eight research reactors as well as plutonium laboratories, nuclear waste treatment and storage plants and radioactive laboratories. Six reactors have been removed from the site and the two remaining have had fuel removed and are in various stages of decommissioning. It is expected the decommissioning will be completed by 2018.

Dounreay is on a larger scale, with 8,000 pieces of work to be undertaken, including the cleaning of the waste shaft, decommissioning the Prototype Fast Reactor and dismantling the dome.

It is expected to take 20 years to empty the shaft alone and to deal with a cocktail of 16,000 items of potentially hazardous radioactive and chemical material.

Nuclear plants have to be cleaned out before being dismantled due to the radiation hazard.

So far more than 100 buildings have been razed, but more than 300 remain and several major projects have yet to be tackled.