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Sellafield must learn lessons of BP’s Texas City disaster, says its new boss
Tony Fountain, a former BP executive, describes working practices at Britain’s largest nuclear site as similar to those at the US refinery that resulted in a catastrophic fire
There are similarities between the poor operating practices at the Texas City oil refinery that blew up in America and the troubled nuclear complex at Sellafield in Cumbria, the former BP executive brought in to shake up the government’s nuclear clean-up operation has warned.
In his first interview as chief executive of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, Tony Fountain admitted there was still a long way to go before Europe’s biggest atomic site was brought up to the highest possible standards, although he said progress had been made by a new private sector management team.
“The parallel to Texas City is apparent. I have talked a lot about it with senior executives,” said Fountain. “If you look at Texas City, there were many kinds of practices, operating practices among them, where people had become habituated to a state of affairs that, if you stepped in from outside and took a look, was not appropriate for the nature of the activity.
“I think that is absolutely true of what happened at Sellafield… Legacy companies had a different set of priorities. There was clearly a set of practices that developed round those [untreated waste] silos that, if you stepped in there, did not have the right level of priority, did not have the right level of challenge, did not have the right level of spend – which is why it is where it is now and needs to be dealt with with the priority it is getting.”
Fountain’s organisation owns Sellafield and a deadly stockpile of 100 tonnes of plutonium but handed over day-to-day control of the Cumbrian site a little over a year ago to a private-sector organisation led by the American group URS Washington and Areva of France.
The nuclear complex has recently been fined by the courts for breaches of health and safety regulations while struggling with equipment failures at a time when it is sitting on top of a mountain of plutonium described by an academic group last year as “manifestly ludicrous.”
Fountain had no direct involvement in BP’s Texas City fire of 2005, which killed 15 workers, but said the lessons learned were applied throughout the oil refining business he presided over in Europe, Africa and Australia.
Fountain said he had “kicked the tyres” at Sellafield and 18 other NDA sites and felt relatively confident he knew the scale of the task he has to tackle. When asked if he had been shocked by anything he saw, he said: “Shock is a strong word. But it would be right to say that the ponds and silos at Sellafield are attention-grabbing; striking in nature.”
Fountain comes in to his new post at a difficult time. Not only does the government’s new energy policy partly depend on the NDA being seen to be safely handling Britain’s old atomic sites, but the £2.8bn annual clean-up budget is under stress as ministers attempt to pare back public spending following the credit crunch.
Fountain said he knows that there is “extreme pressure on spending” as his organisation prepares for meetings in the next few weeks to cover the 2011-2014 public spending round, and acknowledged that the government’s need to prioritise expenditure was a real and pressing one.
“We need to ensure our planning is closely related to the government’s Public Value Programme, to create a set of options that would be implemented if we were required to make cuts in expenditure,” he said. “Against this backdrop, my overall thrust is to focus on ensuring the whole estate improves its levels of efficiency and execution.”
He said he had already seen a range of areas where the NDA’s work regime could be tightened up to provide some of those savings.
Sellafield, the biggest site and the biggest hazard by far in the NDA portfolio, is the obvious place to start. The Cumbrian complex, home to the now-defunct Calder Hall atomic power station plus the Mixed Oxide (MOX) and Thorp nuclear-fuel recycling plants, consumes almost half of the total NDA budget and “you don’t get 100p in the pound” there, Fountain said.
And he acknowledged that the government’s desire to see a new generation of nuclear plants built in Britain will depend partly on public opinion being satisfied that the decommissioning of old stations is proceeding properly.
“The legacy must be dealt with in a confident way, with value for money and as efficiently and safely as possible,” he said. “We must show we are ‘taking away the empties’ before we build the new one, as it were. I think this is critical and I know my owners [ministers] have the same philosophy. They want to see us do this task well, stick to our knitting, because they think the dimensions of it are important so the public has confidence in the future newbuild.”
But Fountain also acknowledged that there could also be competition for supplies, and for skilled staff in an era when many have left the industry. “Clearly capabilities and skills are a common agenda. We need the right skills and capabilities… The newbuild programme needs the same things so we need to act cooperatively. There is no point in Peter robbing Paul.”
And Fountain sees his role not just as improving Sellafield and related sites, but also improving his own company. “The NDA feels like a start-up company… It’s done a lot of things, but like a lot of start-up companies as it develops it becomes a bit cluttered,” he said. “It’s got quite a complex set of processes [around] itself, or around those it employs to work for it, and we need to become a much more effective delivery organisation.”
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