AMERICAN contractors are in pole position to take control of Sellafield, Britain’s most contaminated nuclear site, after the Government gave the green light to a £1 billion sale of British Nuclear Group (BNG), the nuclear clean-up company.

The move, announced yesterday by Alan Johnson, the Trade and Industry Secretary, will mean that a £5 billion, five-year contract to clean up the Sellafield site in the North West of England will be handed over as a dowry to the purchaser of BNG.

Trade unions expressed concern last night that the award of the contract at the same time as the sale would jeopardise an attempt to introduce genuine competition into decommissioning work.

However, Sir Anthony Cleaver, head of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), pledged that the safe decommissioning of Sellafield would be a higher priority than the proceeds raised by any sale. “We are absolutely aligned with the company, the DTI and the Treasury on this. The sale price is a relatively small matter,” Sir Anthony said.

Robust pre-qualification criteria are to be set up for interested parties, and BNG and the NDA have said that there will be a high bar set for would-be buyers. “No one will get into the sales process that has not met our criteria. A key driver for the sale is a significant performance improvement at Sellafield,” Sir Anthony said.

Dougie Rooney, national officer of the Amicus union, which is opposed to the sale on principle, said: “They had better make sure that they have genuine competition, because to me it looks like a stitch-up.”

Mike Graham, national secretary of Prospect, the technical union, which has the most Sellafield workers among its membership, said: “We don’t like it (the sale) but pragmatism rules. It had to happen because the Government had lost confidence in (the BNG parent company) BNFL’s track record.”

Likely contenders for the company, which employs about 800 people and manages 12,000 more across 18 sites, are expected to include a handful of American engineering groups, including Fluor, Bechtel, Jacobs and the Washington Group; Amec, the British project management and engineering group; and Serco, the British support services company.

The decision to sell BNG, which is expected to be completed by Autumn 2007, was accompanied by the disclosure that the cost of decommissioning Britain’s 20 civil nuclear sites has risen to £70 billion — £14 billion higher than last year’s estimate. The cost of cleaning up sites has risen from £44 billion to £56 billion.

• BNFL Group, the government-owned nuclear group is parent company of British Nuclear Group, the decommissioning services group that manages 12,000 people at 18 sites, through contracts awarded by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, the state body that owns Britain’s civil nuclear sites, and awards the contracts for, and oversees, their clean-up

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