The power of leveraging strategic partnerships to deliver value
Dr Samantha Harris, Director of Shareholder and Stakeholder Relations
| Nuclear Decommissioning Authority
On the 17th and 18th of September we hosted our biannual in-person stakeholder summit which saw over 170 delegates come together in Manchester from across our vast range of stakeholder groups.
It was an opportunity to showcase the progress being made in delivering our nationally important mission to clean up the UK’s earliest nuclear power stations and highlight how we’re utilising strategic partnerships and working across the sector and beyond to deliver a wealth of benefits.
Our mission is complex. And we can’t deliver it alone. We need the expertise of our supply chain and the insight from our communities. National stakeholders working in partnership with local voices.
We directly employ over 17,000 people across our 17 sites and many more indirectly through the 5,000 plus organisations that form our diverse supply chain. We touch most parts of the UK - around 75% of UK parliamentary constituencies are home to businesses that are supporting our mission.
We spend around half our £4 billion annual budget with the supply chain - of which 38% is spent with small and medium sized enterprises. And it’s not just the economic contribution we are making across the country that is vast, it’s the employment opportunities we are supporting as well.
We’re creating a workforce fit for the future with a £45 million investment in early careers. We’ve recruited 665 apprentices in the last two years and feature over 470 graduates in our programmes. We’re playing a key role in Destination Nuclear, a first of its kind sector-wide careers marketing campaign because we recognise, we need to work together to build a sustainable and diverse workforce to meet the needs of the future.
We’re supporting the pioneers of the future, sponsoring more than 50 PhD students and three post-doctoral researchers. And at the summit, our Group CEO, David Peattie, announced a further investment of £5 million over the next five years to support around 20 PhDs, contributing to our nationally important plutonium disposition strategy work.
We’re cognisant of the significant impact of our work on communities around our sites and work closely with them to build trust and engagement. We have actively supported our site stakeholder groups (SSGs) for the last twenty years and these have had a significant impact on ensuring the views of local people are reflected in how we deliver our mission.
But we also want to prepare our communities for a time when our mission ends. In the last five years we’ve invested £60 million of socio-economic funding in projects that enable permanent and sustainable change in our site communities, which has leveraged millions more from other partners.
We’re delivering the maximum positive social impact, pound for pound, with a strategy aligned to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and developed hand in hand with the communities we serve.
But it’s not just about cleaning up the legacy of the past. Clive Maxwell CBE, Second Permanent Secretary at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spoke at the event, giving an oversight of the priorities of the new government and the critical role the NDA group and wider nuclear sector play in securing greater energy independence, achieving net zero targets and galvanising economic growth.
Nuclear decommissioning and waste management are a vital part of the lifecycle of nuclear power. By providing confidence in the safe management and disposal of nuclear waste we are supporting nuclear ambitions for the future
We are helping to keep the lights on across the nation, working with Sellafield, Nuclear Transport Solutions (NTS) and EDF to transport spent fuel from their AGR stations.
It was a sign of this strong relationship that Sir Alex Chisholm, EDF’s UK Chair, spoke at the event, both about EDF’s role in helping Britain achieve net zero, but also in that there is plenty to do if we are to deliver energy security, meet the target for net zero, deliver growth and jobs, and realise the full potential of nuclear – with people and partnerships at the heart of that.
And its innovation that is driving this collaborative spirit. We’re being innovative in how we work with our supply chain, for example establishing the Programme and Project Partners model, at Sellafield.
The award-winning partnership brings together KBR, Jacobs, Morgan Sindall Infrastructure, Altrad Babcock and Sellafield Ltd to deliver a 20-year pipeline of major infrastructure projects to support the decommissioning of the site.
Through the PPP, Sellafield can secure greater stability in the supply chain, greater workforce flexibility, and more realistic long-term planning in project delivery which the Infrastructure and Projects Authority has recognised has had a major positive impact on performance since its inception.
We’re working closely with our academic partners, recognising that we need innovative engineering solutions to solve the challenges posed by our sites which were designed without decommissioning in mind.
Each year our group invests £100million in Research & Development (R&D) to solve challenging technical problems more effectively, more efficiently, and, where possible, for less cost.
In collaboration with the defence sector, we’ve just awarded contracts totalling £2 million to four innovative organisations to develop cutting edge remote sensing innovations which could be used to tackle common challenges across the defence, security and nuclear decommissioning sectors.
The funded technologies will autonomously monitor, track and detect security breaches - keeping human operators out of harm’s way while providing the information they need to inform their response.
It’s a team effort across academia, the supply chain, regulators and government to take solutions from concept to deployment. Our partnerships are delivering tangible benefits, allowing us to access areas that were previously inaccessible, keeping our people safe and away from potential harm.
For example, Lyra, a robot designed by Dounreay and researchers at the University of Manchester, has been used to safely inspect hazardous environments for significant periods of time and in areas where human access is impossible. It was recognised by Time magazine as one of the top 200 innovations of 2022 and use of this technology could accelerate the pace of decommissioning and save as much as £500 million over 100 deployments.
We are world leaders in nuclear decommissioning. We employ one of the most knowledgeable and experienced nuclear workforces in the world and we also leverage that internationally. From actively engaging with the International Atomic Energy Agency on behalf of the UK, to participating in international co-operation agreements with the United States, Canada, South Korea and many others, we recognise the importance and value of representing the UK on the global stage.
We’re providing export opportunities for UK companies and secondments from Japan to the UK to develop global experts of the future. Our £12 million world-leading alliance with Japan on project LongOps is supporting this ambition by developing new automation and robotic capabilities with global potential, applicable to both cutting edge fusion research and decommissioning.
But we never forget our ultimate aim: to free up our land for societal reuse, delivering benefit to local communities the environment and the wider economy.
Forming strategic partnerships is vital in enabling this and we’re working with Dumfries & Galloway Council, NRS, South of Scotland Enterprise (SOSE) and Borderlands Inclusive Growth Deal to develop our Chapelcross site into a Green Energy Hub, driving growth in the local Scottish economy, attracting high value jobs, skills and activities in the green energy industry to the area.
Our mission is one which is of national importance, but there’s much more to what we do than just cleaning up the legacy of the past. We are supporting wider government ambitions and working together with our partners to deliver a safe, sustainable and prosperous future for generations to come.
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