Monthly Highlights from the Russian Arctic, October 2024
In this news digest, we monitor events that impact the environment in the Russian Arctic. Our focus lies in identifying the factors that contribute to pollution and climate change.
News
Publish date: April 4, 2005
Written by: Charles Digges
News
By a 2004 order of the British Governments Department of Trade and Industry, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) came into existence on Friday April 1st, and ownership of the UKs main nuclear sites, including Sellafield and Dounreay were passed into the new organsation. It will now be the NDAs job to contract out clean-up operations for those sites at the most cost effective dividend for UK taxpayers
Many facilities at these sites, most notably Sellafield—where Britains post war effort to develop the bomb began—are approaching the end of their engineered life spans, and cannot simply be knocked down. They must be meticulously decommissioned, a processes that has already started at many of Sellafields aging sites and is a process that could take some 100 years.
Future employment cutsBut an interview with Derek Simpson, general secretary of the Amicus trade union that that Sellafield workers belong to predicted higher long term layoffs in an interview with the BBC, from a current 12,000 permanent staff members to 4000 by 2011.
Amicus has also called for permanent staff to be retrained to carry out the decommissioning work and plans to oppose the outsourcing of any core work.
"We need to maximise the number of job opportunities available through the decommissioning process by re-skilling Sellafield workers, he told the BBC.
"Unless we start training people now, we are in danger of damaging the whole of UK manufacturing and disadvantaging Sellafield workers and the whole Cumbrian economy. Amicus is committed to maintaining our members’ terms and conditions at Sellafield—ensuring that pay and pensions provision are not threatened by the outsourcing of work."
The government has pledged to create "high quality jobs" to replace those lost during and after the decommissioning process at Sellafield the BBC reported.
Bellona Web interviews on the ground with BNG workers on the Sellafield site confirmed that they viewed the coming of the NDA as more a cosmetic and management related than ground shifting. But if Amicus Stimpson is correct, the bulk of these workers will face unemployment lines unless drastic measures are taken.
BNG public relations officer Stagg, a BNFL veteran of more than two decades, was not so sure how the employment situation would change.
Certainly, I hope that BNG will remain among the main contractors at Sellafield for continuitys sake, he said. He envisioned a situation after 2008 in which several contractors would be bidding and eventually working on various decommissioning projects but whether these contractors will be on site will be at the discretion of the NDA.
In this news digest, we monitor events that impact the environment in the Russian Arctic. Our focus lies in identifying the factors that contribute to pollution and climate change.
A survey of events in the field of nuclear and radiation safety relating to Russia and Ukraine.
A visit last week by Vladimir Putin and a Kremlin entourage to Astana, Kazakhstan sought in part to put Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear corporation, on good footing with local officials.
Russia is formally withdrawing from a landmark environmental agreement that channeled billions in international funding to secure the Soviet nuclear legacy, leaving undone some of the most radioactively dangerous projects and burning one more bridge of potential cooperation with the West.