Background to the report

Sellafield is the UK’s most complex and challenging nuclear site with highly hazardous materials stored there from across the UK’s nuclear industry. It also holds a legacy of contaminated buildings, untreated waste and ageing facilities.

Jump to downloads

The government considers that some of these buildings and their contents pose an ‘intolerable’ risk – meaning risk reduction must be the overriding factor in the decision-making of the public body in charge of Sellafield, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA).

While workers at Sellafield have started retrieving and safely storing waste, the NDA expects full site remediation will take until 2125.

Scope of the report

This report examines progress since we last reported in 2018 and, in particular, the extent to which the NDA and Sellafield have improved on the issues we have previously identified. It covers the following.

  • Governance and oversight of nuclear decommissioning: The extent to which the NDA’s reforms since 2018 are securing benefits and improving governance and oversight of decommissioning risks (Part One).
  • Progress to date in managing risks from the nuclear legacy: How well Sellafield has performed since 2018 on managing risks from the nuclear legacy and what more it needs to do (Part Two).
  • Understanding future risks and planning: Sellafield’s ability to assess and understand current and emerging decommissioning risks and to put in place short- and long- term plans to address these (Part Three).

Video summary

Report director, Charles Nancarrow, provides an overview.

Conclusions

It is now 20 years since the NDA was set up to manage the UK’s nuclear legacy, and eight years since it brought the Sellafield site back under its direct control. However, Sellafield is still in the early stages of delivering its mission of cleaning up the Sellafield site, which it expects to take until 2125.

This is an exceptionally challenging mission: Sellafield needs to build new facilities to treat and store different types of nuclear waste, while continuing to maintain ageing facilities and their supporting infrastructure until they can be emptied of waste and decommissioned.

Sellafield has made progress since we last reported in 2018. It has demonstrated that it is possible to retrieve the most hazardous waste from four of its oldest stores and store it in a way which meets modern safety standards, and the reorganisation of the NDA is bringing benefits.

Increasingly, Sellafield is able to draw on expertise from elsewhere in the NDA group and it is taking action to improve performance on major projects. There are also some recent signs that Sellafield is more willing to confront and resolve difficult issues.

In spite of these improvements, we cannot yet say that the NDA and Sellafield are achieving value for money – by which we mean outcomes commensurate with the considerable expenditure on the site. Large projects are still being delivered later than planned and at higher cost. Sellafield has made slower progress in reducing site risks than it would have liked and must now significantly accelerate the pace at which it is retrieving waste from its oldest storage facilities.

Simultaneously, it needs to address the deteriorating condition of key assets and develop credible plans for maintaining the analytical capabilities the site depends upon and improving (and sustaining) its workforce’s capability. It still lacks a comprehensive measure to assess progress in reducing risk. If it underperforms, the cost of completing its mission will increase considerably, and ‘intolerable’ safety risks will persist for longer.

Downloads

Publication details

Press release

View press release (23 Oct 2024)

Latest reports