Majors vie for £20m Sellafield project controls contract

Sellafield, the UK's biggest nuclear power station, is undertaking a major restructure of its project controls arrangements.

British Nuclear Group, which runs the plant, is scrapping an existing array of project controls contracts in favour of a single deal for one provider with a contract value of £10m per annum for two years. The deal includes two one-year extension options.

Turner & Townsend and Faithful+Gould are among the bidders for the new look contract, with Franklin + Andrews and Gleeds also thought to be in the running. BNG will announce the chosen provider within a month's time.

BNG has 300 people working in project controls at Sellafield. Of these, half are on the BNG payroll and the rest are from external companies, including T&T, F+G, F+A and Gleeds.

Gleeds and F+A held on to key QSing contracts at Sellafield in December after BNG re-tendered their deals. A total of 60 staff from the firms will work on the decommissioning work at the plant, worth £750m a year and expected to last for around 50 years. The unsuccessful bidders were EC Harris, F+G, T&T and Bucknall Austin.

T&T currently has a project controls team of 35 assigned to Sellafield. Ashley Prail, director of T&T Project Controls, said that if the firm won the new contract it would need to find around 115 people to fill the resulting jobs. He said the recruits were likely to come from people already working at Sellafield for rival firms. "People tend to be married to the job, not the company," he said.

The company that wins the Sellafield project controls contract will be well placed to pick up major contracts if the government decides to green light new build work in the nuclear sector. Although no new builds have taken place in the UK for 10 years, Prail and other industry sources expect the government to announce an intention to build new facilities in one year to 18 months.

People tend to be married to the job, not the company

Ashley Prail, director, T&T Project Controls

"The signs are that (new builds will be okayed) in the lifetime of this government and they won't do it in an election year," explained Prail.

The government's energy review, widely believed to be a prelude to an expansion of the UK's nuclear capacity, kicked off its period of public consultation last month.

At T&T work in the nuclear sector accounts for 3% of group turnover and about 70% of the turnover of its project controls company.

All of the UK's 11 major nuclear sites are in the process of re-tendering major contracts. The vast majority of the current work is decommissioning contracts, which are understood to total £56bn.

But site remediation activities are also underway, including groundwater and contaminated land remediation. There is also work in storing and reprocessing spent fuel, storing reusable products and returning products such as plutonium in the form of mixed oxide fuel to customers.