By Alan Irving airving@cngroup.co.uk

Last updated 16:00, Wednesday, 11 June 2008

A BIG firm of Irish bookmakers is taking bets on who will win the lucrative contract to run Sellafield.

With several weeks to run before the NDA contract is awarded, Paddy Power makes the American company CH2M Hill odds-on favourites to become the nuclear site’s new parent body organisation (PBO).

CH2M Hill, whose HQ is in Colorado, has a global presence of more than 23,000 employees and is presently top of the Paddy Power betting at 4-to-one on.

Second at the moment is the Serco-Bechtel-Babcock & Wilcox group (3-1). They are followed by the URS Washington-Amec-Areva consortium (8-1) and Fluor-Toshiba (12-1).

An NDA spokesman told The Whitehaven News: “It’s causing a smile, we’ve seen the odds and we don’t have a problem but there is no way that Paddy Power can have any inside information – it’s impossible.

“All the bits and pieces of the individual bids are being evaluated by our experts and they don’t know who they are actually scoring for and against – it’s all A, B,C & D. At the end of it all one man will sit in a sealed room and add up all the scores, then about 10 others will go in and do the checking, after that the winning bid will go to government for final approval.

“At the moment there are no winners or losers.”

The NDA plans to complete the complex process in July.