The government botched a £7 billion contract to decommission Britain’s first generation of nuclear power plants, resulting in the wrong company winning the tender, a High Court judge has ruled. The judgment opens the door to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority paying damages to an American company that was part of one of the losing consortiums. It will also revive memories of the West Coast main line fiasco, when the government was forced to scrap a decision to award the contract to FirstGroup under pressure from Virgin Trains in 2012. The companies were bidding for the work of safely dismantling 12 Magnox nuclear reactors, ten of them at power plants such as Sizewell A, Wylfa and Hinkley Point A that were built in the 1960s and 1970s, and two of them at nuclear testing sites. The Magnox reactors were the British-designed systems that powered the world’s first nuclear power plants outside Russia.
Times 30th July 2016 read more »