Supply Chain

The UK government needs to take nuclear disposal seriously as the country’s decommissioning supply chain competes for talent with a build-out programme and the oil and gas industries.

 Engineering students Daniel Hagan, Domanic Hodgson, Ashley Chamley and Alex Miller this month donned their hard hats for an unusual assignment: posing for cameras.

The foursome, of Lakes College, Lillyhall, UK, joined their principal Cath Richardson for a photo shoot to commemorate the appointment of contractor to build a new construction skills centre for the nuclear industry.

The centre, which will take on 280 trainees a year when completed, is undoubtedly great news for the industry. But what Hagan, Hodgson, Chamley and Miller probably do not realise is that their skills will be just as important in taking plants apart as in putting them together.

The Decomm opportunity

Nuclear plant decommissioning has traditionally been something of a minority sport in the UK. In the early days, most of those that made up the supply chain came to it in order to take advantage of skills gained in waning nuclear construction and fuelling activities.

Now, though, “there’s quite a lot of people who have seen the opportunity and gone into it,” says Derek Wolstenholme, decommissioning programme manager at Westinghouse-owned Springfields Fuels, which has provided nuclear fuel fabrication services since the mid-1940s.

The result is an increasingly diverse supply chain comprising UK players such as AMEC, Hertel, Doosan Babcock, Babcock International and VHE Group, French companies including Vinci and Areva, and US firms like Bechtel, URS, Energy Solutions, Jacobs and CH2M Hill.

In addition, three companies, Augean South, Sita (Lancashire) and Waste Recycling Group (WRG), have applied for permits to dispose of low-level waste (LLW) or high-volume very low-level waste (HV-VLLW). They have not found it easy, mind.

WRG’s application for a HV-VLLW permit at its Lillyhall Landfill site, Cumbria, was approved by the UK Environment Agency in April last year, almost two years after it was made.

Planning permission

An Augean application for LLW disposal at Kings Cliffe, Northamptonshire, also took nearly two years for approval and had to get planning permission, which was rejected at first and only granted on appeal.

Sita, meanwhile, filed its application for LLW disposal at Clifton Marsh, Lancashire, in November 2009 and is still awaiting a permit. Why the wait?

Part of it may be down to the fact that the UK has a pretty good reputation when it comes to decommissioning, and the government is keen to go by the book.

“The French tend to have their sites listed as nationalised assets so they are exempt from requirements because they say it is in the national interest, whereas we tend to play ball, so there’s a lot more restrictions in the UK,” Wolstenholme says.

Phil Holland, development manager at Sita UK, admits that one of the things that has delayed his company’s disposal application has been the need to comply with European Commission Article 37 requirements.

“At the start it was new to us and the Environment Agency and SEPA [the Scottish Environment Protection Agency],” he says. “The Article 37 request came as a bit of a rude surprise to both parties.”

But with Sita’s Article 37 submission approved, Holland is wondering why his Clifton Marsh permit seems to have been lost in the post. “I don’t know,” he says. “It’s a bit like there is a fear of concluding.”

That perception of a lack of urgency echoes concerns voiced in a report by the UK Centre for Policy Studies earlier this month.

Political clarity

The Atomic Clock: How the Coalition is gambling with Britain’s energy policy cautioned that a lack of political clarity over nuclear policy could stymie the UK’s new-build programme.

But another worry, voiced by those within the decommissioning supply chain, is that a rush to build new reactors could rob the industry of skills that are vitally needed to dismantle old plants.

“A growing demand for new build is starting to impact on recruitment drives of typical decommissioning companies,” says Ian Whitehouse, decommissioning head of commercial at Sellafield Limited. “There is also high demand in oil and gas, which pulls on the same resource.”

Nuclear insiders agree that a lack of focus on decommissioning right now could lead to bottlenecks that might be difficult to deal with later down the line. For example, says Holland, there is currently 3.4 million cubic tonnes of HV-VLLW that could be disposed of in landfill.

But owing to delays in permitting much of it is being dumped at the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority’s LLW repository at Drigg, Cumbria, which only has capacity for around 700,000 cubic tonnes. 

To deal with these issues, the UK Government needs to get serious about decommissioning, speeding up the permitting process and helping stimulate skills retention.

Beyond training new recruits at sites such as Lakes College, Whitehouse suggests measures such as longer-term contracts and subsidised relocation to key sites. “The government could get quite clever here, as a country,” he figures. The question is: will it?