Sellafield: PAC scrutinises the c.£130bn century-long mission to clean it up
The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) examines decommissioning Sellafield on Thursday 20 March at 10am, proceeding from the National Audit Office’s (NAO) own report on the topic.
Meeting details
The Sellafield nuclear site closed in 2003, having operated since 1950. Work began to decommission the site in 2005. Highly hazardous materials are stored there from across the UK’s nuclear industry, and it holds a legacy of contaminated buildings, untreated waste and ageing facilities, some of which pose an ‘intolerable’ risk*. Sellafield has started addressing these risks and retrieving and storing nuclear waste, but at too slow a pace.
The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), the public body in charge of Sellafield, expects full site remediation will take until 2125. The forecast future cost of decommissioning Sellafield, after adjusting for inflation, was £136bn in March 2024 – this is 18.8% higher than it was in March 2019.
The NDA’s plans also depend constructing a Geological Disposal Facility elsewhere in England, to permanently store the waste deep underground. The location for this has yet to be determined, and will not be ready until the 2050s at the earliest. The NAO found that every decade of delay will force Sellafield to build another store at a cost of approximately £500m-£760m.
The session will likely also see the NDA and Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) challenged on the effectiveness of their oversight of Sellafield. The NAO’s report found that the culture at Sellafield has not been sufficiently focused on accountability for performance improvement in recent years, while highlighting that that the NDA reported
‘special payments’ in its 2023/24 annual report of £377,200 made to one or more of its former employees to settle claims relating to employment matters.