UR TV CAST

Why go to the expense of turning Sellafield into a wildlife sanctuary and building theme parks on the site of the old Magnox stations if they are going to be contaminated all over again? It would, of course, mean storing up the problem for a future generation to sort out but that has been the story of this industry since the world’s very first nuclear electricity began being pumped out of Calder Hall on the Cumbrian coast half a century ago. Don’t ask CoRWM where the waste will actually be buried but, as Sellafield has been “hosting” the bulk of it since it began reprocessing, it is not hard to guess which site is likely to emerge as the favourite.Without a government guarantee that anyone building a new generation of reactors would be able to charge enough for their output to cover these so-called “back-end” costs and still turn a profit, a nuclear renaissance looks out of the question.The NDA’s arithmetic could change radically if a decision was taken to go ahead with a new generation of nukes and, as seems obvious, build them on the site of existing ones. Two decades after Nirex first began the public debate about what to do with the stuff, its successor CoRWM (the nuclear industry does love its acronyms) has narrowed the options down to four, ranging from long-term interim storage just above or below ground to deep burial. With the exception of Sellafield, the plan now is to decommission the sites in the next 25 years rather than delaying until the next century as originally intended.Fixing a cost and a timescale for cleaning up the sites is one thing. Finding somewhere to store the waste that must be removed from them is quite another. A few more billions will have to be added to that total if the plutonium stored at Sellafield turns out not to be the asset it is currently classed as in the Government’s book and turns instead into a liability.The green lobby, needless to say, can barely contain its glee on the grounds that you couldn’t invent a better advertisement for wind power as the best way for Britain to meet its ambitious environmental targets.In light of the escalating bill, the NDA might have been forgiven for wanting to defer payment for as long as possible But not a bit of it.

Until now.The Government’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority calculates that the cost of cleaning up Britain’s 20 oldest civil nuclear sites (not including the eight still in operation with British Energy) has risen by a further £8bn since the last time the sums were done. The enormous cost of nuclear decommissioning has been almost totally ignored in the debate about whether Britain should be building a new generation of reactors to replace those due to close down. Would the Heathrow catering dispute have flared up in the way it has if the staff involved were part of BA and it had full control over the operation? Impossible to say. But it is a timely reminder that outsourcing operations, especially to gimlet-eyed private equity firms, can be a double-edged sword. Putting a price on the nuclear option It is the elephant in the corner of the room and, weighing in at £56bn, it is a pretty big one too. Hence the strike.BA has done much the same with other “non-core” activities as the airline has concentrated on just the actual flying and maintenance of its aircraft. The business was taken over by the US private equity fund Texas Pacific which has decided it can no longer sustain the losses it is suffering and needs to introduce new pay and conditions.

By and large, it has achieved these draconian cuts with hardly a murmur of protest: staff have understood that the airline is battling for its survival, not making redundancies for the sake of it or to boost shareholder dividends (they haven’t had one in four years).But occasionally, the resentment boils to the surface and, in each case, the root cause can be traced back to the efficiency drive on which the airline has embarked.Although the Gate Gourmet staff involved in the present dispute work for an entirely separate company, they were employed by BA until 1997, when the airline decided to outsource its catering to a third party in order to save money. Now his retirement party threatens to be gatecrashed by a new bout of industrial unrest.Since the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, BA has slashed its workforce by more than 13,000 and shaved more than £700m from its costs. Only a week ago, BA’s chief executive Sir Rod Eddington was happily preparing to fly off into the sunset after reporting the airline’s best results in nine years. Three different problems but the same result in each case: pictures beamed around the world of thousands of stranded passengers milling around Heathrow and a planeload of bad publicity for BA.

And it was all going so well. This year, it is secondary action in support of striking catering staff employed by an outside company which has forced BA passengers to go hungry and check-in facilities to be shut down. Last year, it was the cancellation of hundreds of flights at the height of the holiday rush after BA discovered that its generous redundancy programme had left it with too few staff.

In 2003, it was the famous swipe-card strike, caused by BA’s over-zealous attempt to introduce new clocking-on arrangements for ground staff. But no such leniency is applied to the use of the Olympic rings logo.. It must be August because for the third summer in a row a crisis has come along out of a clear blue sky to send British Airways into a tailspin. But such companies will be prevented from associating with the London Olympics.The BOA has been lenient towards certain companies such as those set up shortly after 1995 or those with Greek proprietors who chose the name after the birthplace of the Games. That protects the use of the Olympic name whose unapproved use had threatened the income of the BOA, which exists without government funding. The rules are not as restrictive as they sound.”Companies that operate in the UK with the word “Olympic” – about 30 in the London area alone – exist lawfully because they were established before a law was introduced in 1995. They don’t get their names on shirts or hoardings but they get the association with the movement instead If they didn’t pay then the taxpayer would have to.

“These companies effectively pay for the staging of the Games. By then, a team of five full-time inspectors will have been appointed by the Games’ organising committee to shut down any businesses operating outside the strict new laws.Sara Friend, a lawyer for the British Olympic Association (BOA), insisted that criticism from the advertising industry that the proposed legislation was too restrictive was unjust.”There is a strong requirement to protect the integrity of the Olympic brand,” she said. Companies trading illegally under the Olympic brand will be outlawed under new laws for the 2012 Games. P&O said that, given the Calais problems, it was not possible to tell how the new fares regime had gone down with passengers.. The fare charged responds to the level of demand and there is greater flexibility about when people can travel Eurotunnel has introduced a similar fares system. The company insisted that the benefits of a cost-cutting programme were coming through.Robert Woods, the chief executive, said: “Good progress has been made with the implementation of the fundamental business review [for ferries] and we remain on track to achieve a total profit improvement of £50m per annum from 2006.”In April, P&O introduced a new fares system for ferry passengers, modelled on the ticket pricing used by airlines.