The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority

16 November 2005

Approximately 50% of the NDA’s annual budget of £2.2bn is derived from income from various commercial activities. Of this, more than a half comes from the storage and reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel at the THORP plant.

As outlined in the NDA Draft Strategy, published in August, the total projected revenue from THORP from now until 2010, when current orders are scheduled for completion, is £5.1bn.

Planned income from storage and reprocessing activities at THORP for this financial year was £575m. However, the actual financial impact of the outage will be mitigated by a number of factors:

• The nature of the contracts with THORP’s customers are such that certain planned payments continue to be made. 
• A seven-week planned outage was timetabled and accounted for.
• Staff have been redeployed to other decommissioning duties.
• The NDA has insurance cover including material damage and business interruption which covers incidents of this nature.

We must wait until the NII has published its report into the incident and we have had the opportunity to understand the implications of its findings before a clear way forward for THORP is determined. In the meantime safety remains the NDA’s number one priority and we are working closely with British Nuclear Group to scrutinise potential engineering solutions for a possible restart. The cost of any restart solution has not yet been fixed.

Because of these factors our current estimate is that planned revenue from THORP will be reduced by around 5% for the full financial year 05/06 due to the plant’s outage. In the event of a restart of reprocessing operations much of the lost income may be recovered from customers over time and the final quantification will depend on the engineering solution.

If all regulatory issues are addressed and a restart is made by Summer 2006, then we expect that contractual commitments can be achieved by the end of 2010.