Total cost of cleaning up legacy site in northwest England could reach £136bn
Sellafield Ltd has awarded work with a maximum value of £4.6bn (€5.2bn, $6bn) to four companies that will support high hazard risk reduction programmes on the Sellafield nuclear site in Cumbria, northwest England.
The work was awarded through the Decommissioning and Nuclear Waste Partnership (DNWP), a 15-year initiative to support activities related to retrieving waste materials from the Sellafield site’s oldest facilities as well as treating and storing those materials and decommissioning redundant assets.
The companies that won contracts are A2R, Amentum, The Decommissioning Alliance and Nuclear Decommissioning Solutions.
US-based engineering and nuclear services company Amentum said it had been awarded work to deliver long-term remediation and waste retrieval work at the site.
A2R, a partnership between AtkinsRéalis and Altrad, will carry our remediation projects, while Nuclear Decommissioning Solutions, which combines Altrad, Cavendish Nuclear and Shepley Engineers, will focus on retrieving waste from silos.
The Decommissioning Alliance, a joint venture between Amentum, AtkinsRéalis, and Westinghouse, will help retrieve hazardous waste from legacy ponds at the site.
Amentum said its share of potential work as remediation partner could reach an estimated £1.4bn.
Its work will focus on waste decommissioning, clearing redundant buildings for re-use and undertaking preparatory dismantling of the UK’s oldest nuclear reactor and fuel-handling facilities.
Amentum will use robot-operated systems, including a vacuum-based device, for removing and transferring radioactive sludge, alongside remotely operated vehicles for inspection, cutting, and waste handling in high-radiation areas.
Sellafield Ltd expects spending on decommissioning to increase through 2040, as more legacy facilities transition from operations to dismantling. The DNWP framework will coordinate the site’s future hazard reduction and cleanup programmes.
Sellafield, formerly known as Windscale, is a large multi-function nuclear site. Primary activities are nuclear waste processing and storage and nuclear decommissioning. Former activities included nuclear power generation from 1956 to 2003 and nuclear fuel reprocessing from 1952 to 2022.
Last year the UK’s public spending watchdog said the cost of cleaning up Sellafield was expected to increase by £21bn to £136bn.
