Thorp’s future secure – NDA

Last updated at 14:17, Friday, 26 June 2009

THORP’s future at Sellafield is secure despite the troubled reprocessing plant having to shutdown for seven months for maintenance and engineering work.

In an exclusive interview with The Whitehaven News, Sellafield’s legal owners, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, has given Thorp a vote of confidence to carry on for another six years and complete a multi-billion pounds order book.

“Thorp’s future is not under review,” pledged Ian Hudson, the NDA’s man on the spot at Sellafield.

GMB site convenor Peter Kane said: “It’s great news for the workforce.”

Thorp employs around 1,500 but many more jobs at Sellafield and in the community depend on its reprocessing operations.

After a recent crisis caused by the failure of one of Sellafield’s three process evaporators, Cumbrian anti-nuclear group Core said Thorp was “on a knife’s edge” and called for the plant to be closed.

“It would be an act of kindness to put this white elephant out of its misery,” said Core’s Martin Forwood.

A major leak of radioactive liquor in 2005 first put Thorp’s future in jeopardy, leading to a near three-year shutdown and a £500,00 Crown Court fine for safety breaches.

The NDA has been monitoring the plant’s progress closely ever since and officially had its “performance under review”.

Ian Hudson, the NDA’s man on the spot at Sellafield, said this was no longer the case.

Allaying the concerns, Dr Hudson, who is Sellafield’s programme director for the NDA, said: “Thorp’s future is planned out to 2015 which is making sure we deliver the commercial contracts. In the longer term the government has to decide what it wants to do in terms of spent fuel management.

“It wasn’t a big decision to get Thorp re-started otherwise the question was ‘where do you put the spent fuel when it comes out of the reactors?’ The most effective way is reprocessing.

“The issue here is that we have to maintain operations for the UK, this also helps keeps the lights on.”

Asked about the possibility of Sellafield eventually having a second oxide reprocessing plant (Thorp 2), he said: “There have been questions asked but I don’t think we are in that kind of mode yet. At the same time we do have to think what we want to do with all this spent fuel?”

While the NDA’s priority is to clean up and decommission Sellafield through its parent body landlords (Nuclear Management Partners), Dr Hudson added: “The fact is that when it comes to running Sellafield, Magnox and Thorp equals jobs for West Cumbria.”

One of the key’s to the site’s longer term future is having enough evaporator capacity. The funding for a fourth evaporator – around £380 million had been approved by the NDA Board – was awaiting final government confirmation.

Peter Kane said the Sellafield unions’ campaign for more reprocessing ahead of 2015 still stood.

“We believe there are further contracts out there,” he declared.

Mr Hudson said: “International Nuclear Services, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the NDA, are out chasing business commercially with the Japanese and other companies and it all depends on how you balance this with our focus on reducing the higher hazard plants on the site.”