The most hazardous building in Britain could leak radioactive water until the 2050s as clean-up operations at Sellafield struggle to progress quickly enough, MPs have warned.
In a report published on Wednesday, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) criticised the speed of decommissioning work at the former nuclear power plant, citing examples of “failure, cost overruns and continuing safety concerns”.
Although the committee noted there were “signs of improvement”, PAC chairman Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown said Sellafield continued to present “intolerable risks”.
Hazardous
He said: “As with the fight against climate change, the sheer scale of the hundred-year timeframe of the decommissioning project makes it hard to grasp the immediacy of safety hazards and cost overruns that delays can have.
“Every day at Sellafield is a race against time to complete works before buildings reach the end of their life. Our report contains too many signs that this is a race that Sellafield risks losing.”
The PAC said those risks were underlined by the Magnox Swarf Storage Silo (MSSS), which the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) described to the committee as “the most hazardous building in the UK”.
The MSSS has been leaking radioactive water into the ground since 2018, releasing enough water to fill an Olympic swimming pool every three years, and is likely to continue leaking until the oldest section of the building has been emptied in the 2050s, around a decade later than previously expected.
Pointing to the fact that Sellafield Ltd had missed most of its annual targets for retrieving waste from buildings, including the MSSS, the committee warned: “The consequence of this underperformance is that the buildings are likely to remain extremely hazardous for longer.”
Urgency
The NDA has acknowledged that the leak is its “single biggest environmental issue”, and a spokeswoman said managing it and retrieving waste from the MSSS was “our highest priority”.
She added: “As the report says, the leak in the Magnox Swarf Storage Silo is contained and does not pose a risk to the public. Regulators accept that the current plan to tackle the leak is the most effective one.”
Sir Geoffrey said: “It is of vital importance that the Government grasp the daily urgency of the work taking place at Sellafield, and shed any sense of a far-off date of completion for which no-one currently living is responsible.
Disposal
“Sellafield’s risks and challenges are those of the present day. There are some early indications of some improvement in Sellafield’s delivery, which our report notes. Government must do far more to hold all involved immediately accountable to ensure these do not represent a false dawn, and to better safeguard both the public purse and the public itself.”
Sellafield ceased generating electricity in 2003 and, in addition to work cleaning up the site, now processes and stores nuclear waste from power plants around the UK.