from Sunday Herald, 22 January 2006
PLANS to privatise the £56 billion clean-up of Britain’s ageing nuclear sites will cause serious accidents, one of the industry’s most senior figures has warned.
Brian Watson, former director of the UK’s largest nuclear site at Sellafield in Cumbria, has accused ministers of pursuing “erroneous dogma” that could result in costly mistakes.
His warning comes as Prime Minister Tony Blair prepares to launch his long-awaited energy review this week. The review is widely expected to launch a new programme of nuclear power stations and is set to provoke bitter arguments.
Watson thinks that the introduction of competitive tendering for decommissioning nuclear plants, to begin later this year, could be “disastrous”. He fears the “loss of control” could be similar to that of Railtrack, the private rail company that collapsed in 2001.
Competition is “likely to lead to incidents of a serious nature due to short-termism and lack of experience and knowledge,” he argued. “If you get it wrong at Sellafield, there will be no going back.”
Cost-cutting could cause more accidents like the “near disaster” that closed a Sellafield plutonium plant in 1999, he warned. “There is a real risk of loss of corporate memory … and a repeat of the mistakes of the 1990s.”
Watson worked at the Sellafield complex for more than 30 years and was site director from 1999 until he retired in July 2004. He made his comments in response to the strategy being proposed by the government’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA).
“I am seriously worried that it is driven by government dogma, rather than facts, logic or common sense,” he said. There was “the potential to seriously threaten all aspects of performance” at nuclear sites.
A nuclear fuel reprocessing plant at Sellafield was closed down last April after it was discovered that radioactive liquid had leaked from a broken pipe. Another plant, at Dounreay in Caithness, has been shut since September because of a spillage of radioactive waste.
Both sites are among the 20 that the NDA is planning to privatise by bringing in commercial bidders. It has submitted a plan to government ministers, who are expected to give the go-ahead before the end of March.
The NDA argues that competitive tendering will make decommissioning safer, not more dangerous. “There is plenty of evidence to suggest that safety is improved by bringing in world-class contractors,” said an NDA spokesman. “It is not surprising that some people have concerns, but as far as the NDA is concerned safety is absolutely para mount. And the way safety is regulated will not change.”
This was disputed by Greenpeace consultant Pete Roche. “Sellafield and Dounreay have hardly been paragons of safety as nationalised companies, but things could well get worse,” he said.
Blair’s energy review, to be announced tomorrow, will trigger a storm of protest. Labour’s own green wing, the Socialist Environment and Resources Association (Sera), is this weekend launching a campaign for the party to adopt a sustainable non- nuclear energy policy.
Nuclear power was a “dangerous irrelevance”, said Sera’s Scottish spokeswoman, Claudia Beamish. “We do not believe the issue of nuclear waste can be satisfactorily resolved.”
NEED TO KNOW MORE?Nuclear Decommissioning Authority
