AMERICAN contractors including Fluor and Halliburton are poised to outbid British firms for nuclear clean-up contracts worth £2 billion a year.
The contracts are being put up for tender from next April when the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which will become responsible for cleaning up the UK’s civil nuclear sites, comes into being.
However, the determination of US contractors to bid for the work has alarmed their British rivals who claim to be concerned that contracts to make safe some of the biggest nuclear sites in the UK may be awarded to foreign contractors with no experience of the UK industry.
A spokesman for Fluor, the US company that has contracts worth more than £1 billion to build water pipelines in Iraq, told The Times that its officials had held monthly meetings with British nuclear chiefs, to help to assess opportunities.
Kellogg Brown & Root also confirmed its intention to bid for contracts. “KBR has extensive experience in programme management, and the operation and management of nuclear licensed sites in the UK. We constantly review available opportunities and comply with bid requests if we determine the opportunity is a good business decision,” a spokesman said.
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Fluor has been awarded decommissioning work worth $10 billion (£5.6 billion) by the US Government. Major projects include the Fernald Site near Cincinatti, Ohio and the Hanford Site near Richland, Washington.
“As you can see from these contracts our capacity is pretty large,” Mr Durham said. Fluor’s tactics for winning the contracts are still under discussion but the group, which has had subsidiaries operating in the UK for over 50 years, said that it was considering working with British partners.
Other US contractors that are believed to be preparing to bid for clean-up contracts include Bechtel and Jacobs Engineering.
From next April the NDA will assume responsibilty for the UK’s civil nuclear liabilities, which are calculated at £49 billion. The quango is expected to begin running in shadow form in October, after Sir Anthony Cleaver, a former IBM head, was appointed as its chairman this summer.