Magnox Awards U.K. Nuclear Demolition Contracts

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Written by Martin Lynch, European News Editor for Industrial Info (Galway, Ireland) -- Contracts for the demolition of most of the U.K.'s oldest nuclear power plants have been awarded by Magnox Limited (Berkeley, England).

A framework contract worth €355 million ($477 million) has been awarded to a number of companies for the de-planting, demolition and bulk asbestos removal across 10 nuclear reactor sites in the U.K. Magnox currently operates the sites on behalf of the country's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), which is responsible for making the sites safe as the country sets about building a new fleet of nuclear power plants. Most of the new facilities will be located on, or near, the sites of the existing nuclear plants.

Magnox has chosen specialist contractors including the Doosan Keltbray consortium, the five-company Celadon consortium, Erith (London, England), Squibb/LVI Group, Nuvia Ltd (Warrington, England) and EDS/Kitsons. The company claimed the 'pioneering' framework deal will save billions of euro by enabling more efficient commercial arrangements between Magnox and its contractors, which will reduce tendering costs and provide a supply chain 'toolbox' to meet the needs of the various projects over the coming years.

Work will start in the coming months and kick off with the de-planting of the boiler houses at the Bradwell Site in Essex and the demolition of admin and ancillary buildings at the Dungeness A Site in Kent.

"This gives us a great opportunity to outperform our decommissioning plans by building lon- term supply chain relationships, learning from experience, and increasing our ability to deliver," claimed Alan Bladon, Programme Director for Magnox. "We have brought together a number of related projects in line with our approach to optimised decommissioning which, overall, is expected to save the taxpayer more than £1.3 billion ($2.03 billion) as sites are delivered into care and maintenance."

Last month, Magnox announced that the Oldbury nuclear power station would stop generating electricity in February 2012, which is 10 months earlier than expected. The decision to shut down Reactor One was taken by operator Magnox and site owner the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) (Cumbria, England), in conjunction with the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) (Bootle, England), an independent regulator. The reason given was that, after 44 years of operation, the plant was no longer economically viable. For additional information, see October 26, 2011, article - Oldbury Nuclear Power Plant to Shut Down in Early 2012.

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