The United Kingdom’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority as of Monday has assumed management of the company that is decommissioning the nation’s Magnox reactors.
Magnox Ltd. shifted from the privately operated Cavendish Fluor Partnership to the nondepartmental executive agency of the U.K. government.
“This is a very exciting time for Magnox,” new CEO Gwen Parry-Jones said in a press release. “We have some fantastic talented people and being an NDA subsidiary gives us more opportunities to work closely as part of the NDA group, share ideas and take a more flexible approach to decommissioning the UK’s first generation of nuclear power stations.”
The move is in line with NDA’s assumption of management in 2016 of Sellafield Ltd., the until-then privately managed firm that operated the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing and cleanup site in Cumbria.
The U.K. government announced in 2017 that it would cancel Cavendish Fluor Partnership’s contract to run Magnox Ltd., nine years before it was scheduled to expire. The change was necessary, NDA said at the time, because the scope of work in decommissioning 10 Magnox power reactors and two research sites had grown beyond what four corporate teams had bid on ahead of the 2014 award.
However, the NDA also paid out £97.5 million to settle separate lawsuits from U.S.-based EnergySolutions and Bechtel, which had unsuccessfully partnered to seek the Magnox contract. That came after the U.K. High Court found in 2016, in considering the EnergySolutions lawsuit, that NDA had “manipulated” the contract decision to keep Cavendish Fluor in consideration.
The U.K. National Audit Office in 2017 said the procurement process cost taxpayers £122 million.
The government then announced last year that the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority would take over.
