The Government is sharpening the axe for Britain’s £4 billion nuclear clean-up budget and drawing up plans for big spending cuts at contaminated sites including Sellafield and Dounreay, The Times has learnt.
The Treasury has begun a sweeping review of spending by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), the quango that over the past four years is understood to have spent about £1 billion of taxpayers’ money annually on cleaning up at Britain’s 20 contaminated nuclear sites.
An NDA spokesman said that it was in talks with the Treasury and the Department for Energy and Climate Change about options to cut costs.
These include the acceleration of some pieces of work as well as scrapping or deferring others.
He said that a final shortlist of options would be agreed in February. A Treasury spokesman said that it was “reviewing arm’s length bodies, which could include the NDA”, but no plans had been published and he declined to give further details.
One area of concern is understood to be the fact that almost a third of the NDA’s budget — or £800 million per year — is not spent directly on clean-up operations but on “support”, including administration and other costs.
The bulk of the NDA’s budget is used to pay engineering subcontractor firms involved in clean-up, which employed 18,467 staff on its sites last year. Most work at Sellafield, Europe’s most contaminated industrial site.
The cuts could affect future revenues of companies such as Areva, of France, AMEC and Washington Group, of the United States, which won the main Sellafield decommissioning contract last year, worth an estimated £1.3 billion per year. The NDA’s budget for the four years to 2011 is £8.5 billion.
The Treasury has begun a sweeping review of spending by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), the quango that over the past four years is understood to have spent about £1 billion of taxpayers’ money annually on cleaning up at Britain’s 20 contaminated nuclear sites.
An NDA spokesman said that it was in talks with the Treasury and the Department for Energy and Climate Change about options to cut costs.
These include the acceleration of some pieces of work as well as scrapping or deferring others.
He said that a final shortlist of options would be agreed in February. A Treasury spokesman said that it was “reviewing arm’s length bodies, which could include the NDA”, but no plans had been published and he declined to give further details.
One area of concern is understood to be the fact that almost a third of the NDA’s budget — or £800 million per year — is not spent directly on clean-up operations but on “support”, including administration and other costs.
The bulk of the NDA’s budget is used to pay engineering subcontractor firms involved in clean-up, which employed 18,467 staff on its sites last year. Most work at Sellafield, Europe’s most contaminated industrial site.
The cuts could affect future revenues of companies such as Areva, of France, AMEC and Washington Group, of the United States, which won the main Sellafield decommissioning contract last year, worth an estimated £1.3 billion per year. The NDA’s budget for the four years to 2011 is £8.5 billion.
Source: The Times
No comments:
Post a Comment