Nuclear is waste of time and money

As rebranding jobs go, it’s hard to beat. Somehow, the nuclear lobby has managed to convince politicians that the industry is not only green, but “clean”.
Just about all of them have fallen for it, not least our energy supremo Ed Miliband. Here he is last month: “Homegrown clean energy from renewables and nuclear offers us a security that fossil fuels simply cannot provide”. On the energy security point, fair enough. But isn’t he forgetting something about nukes that you don’t get with windmills and sunbeams?
Luckily, the National Audit Office is not so easily taken in, as it’s just proved with a nice reality check: its latest report on Sellafield, the radioactive waste dump in Cumbria owned by the state-backed Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA). True, there is a glimmer of good news: the spending watchdog says the “management of major projects has begun to improve”. But it must have been off a chronically low base, given the problems the NAO finds.
As it notes, of the NDA’s 17 sites “Sellafield is the UK’s most complex and challenging”: home to “seven former nuclear reactors” and Britain’s “entire stockpile of civilian-owned plutonium”. Indeed, much of the “highly hazardous” stuff knocking around has been deemed by the government to “pose an intolerable risk”. Cleaning it up is a thankless task, too. On NDA estimates, it “will take until 2125”.
Still, just about everywhere you look, Sellafield’s been making a tricky situation worse. Take estimated clean-up costs: they’ve risen to £136 billion, an inflation-adjusted leap of 18.8 per cent against forecasts from March 2019, and now taking up 68 per cent of the NDA’s total provision of £199 billion. Even then, this is “highly uncertain”, as the NAO points out, given the NDA is forecasting 100 years ahead. In its worst case, decommissioning Sellafield could cost “£253 billion”.
One reason for the rocketing costs? “Optimism bias”, as the NAO put it. Thanks to “poor planning”, Sellafield “underestimated” the “complexity” of projects — an issue exacerbated by the “poor performance” of contractors. One result? Costs for four big projects have risen by £1.15 billion since 2018, with delivery slipping by “between 58 and 129 months”.
Then, “the culture at Sellafield has not been sufficiently focused on accountability for performance improvement”. So, while the NAO found Sellafield “can remove safely the most hazardous waste”, it was “not progressing quickly enough”. One example? The Magnox Swarf Storage Silo, which is “leaking 2,100 litres of contaminated water each day”. This “could continue until at least the late 2040s”. In fact, there’s “a risk that facilities to treat the waste” in three “legacy ponds and silos” will “reach the end of their useful lives before all the waste is retrieved”. How nice is that?
Elsewhere, the NAO found that “tensions have existed between Sellafield, the NDA and the Office for Nuclear Regulation”, noting that since last year Sellafield’s ex-boss, Martin Chown, and other senior staff, had left. On top, despite missing targets, the group last year “paid out £2.1 million more in staff bonuses than it should have done”.
Lob in failings on the cybersecurity front, for which Sellafield was fined £332,500 last month, and you can see why the NAO head, Gareth Davies, “cannot conclude Sellafield is achieving value for money yet”. The NDA chief David Peattie admitted “there is still more to be done”.
So, all a bit of a mess, which is the sort of thing you might expect from a massive nuclear clean-up job. Yes, big tech is getting all nuked up for its datacentres, with hopes riding on small modular reactors. And once built — often ten years late and five times over budget — big plants can go on to provide reliable low-carbon energy. There’s a chance, too, that someone invents an easier way to treat the waste. But, for now, calling this industry “clean” is a misnomer. Sellafield is proof of that.
Is your day filled with yawnsville online training sessions? Maybe ones starting with a ho-hum message from the boss, followed by a bit of cartoon role-play and a quiz. In some places, the same stuff keeps coming round. Who isn’t tempted to fit it in among the internet shopping, say, or latest cat videos?
Over at accountants EY, the US staffers showed far more dedication. Such was their enthusiasm for “Ignite Learning Week” that some attended as many online sessions as they could — all at the same time — so earning extra education credits en route to the target 40 in a year. The result? Their careers have ignited in an unforeseen way: dozens of them have been fired.
Yes, fired for multitasking in today’s AI world. Proving it can be ridiculously heavy-handed, EY has deemed that watching two at a time violated its “global code of conduct” — even though it had encouraged staff to attend as many sessions as possible and its systems allowed multiple streaming. Indeed, how did it expect anyone to get through “How strong is your digital brand in the marketplace” without simultaneously viewing “Conversing with AI, one prompt at a time”?
Of course, EY is particularly jumpy, having been fined $100 million by US authorities in 2022 after dozens of staff cheated on professional tests. But only an accountant could fail to spot the difference here.
Brave bit of forecasting from the International Monetary Fund. It’s now shooting for 1.1 per cent UK growth this year, up from its 0.7 per cent estimate in July, with projections unchanged for 2025 at 1.5 per cent. It hasn’t seen Rachel Reeves’s “£40 billion” black hole budget yet.