Unions have claimed that planned redundancies at the Dounreay nuclear complex will put safety at risk and leave taxpayers with an unnecessary bill. The Times understands staff will be told today that they will be invited to apply for the voluntary scheme. The radioactive site is a source of hundreds of highly skilled jobs in one of the most remote parts of the country. Dounreay, in Caithness, played a pioneering role in the UK’s civil nuclear industry and housed Scotland’s first successful reactor in 1958. The site is being decommissioned at a cost of £1.6 billion, in what is seen in the industry as the most complex project of its kind in Europe. Work is expected to continue until the 2030s. Dounreay Site Restoration, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Cavendish Dounreay Partnership Ltd, which is carrying out the closure programme on behalf of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), employs about 1,100 staff at the north coast site. It is believed that employers will invite applications for voluntary redundancies, but have not specified how many workers they are hoping to cut. The operator said there were no plans for any compulsory redundancies. Gary Smith, general secretary of the GMB union in Scotland, said: “Morale is rock bottom, so it may end up being oversubscribed, but ultimately it is the taxpayer that picks up the bill to make the staff redundant. Our big concern is that on a nuclear, safety-critical site, morale is already through the floor, trust in the management is at rock bottom, and now the workforce is going to get another message about job losses. We know if you have bad morale on the site it’s bad for safety. To protect jobs in a remote community that’s totally dependant on this industry, we should be attempting to retain skills, not get rid of staff on pack ages that the taxpayer will ultimately pay for.”
Times 12th April 2017 read more »