Inept waste site renationalised


Mike Barker

Sellafield nuclear reprocessing site is a poorly managed deposit for tens of thousands of tonnes of dangerous nuclear waste.

In 2008 a 17-year contract was awarded to Nuclear Management Partners (NMP) comprising URS Corporation, British firm Amec and energy company Areva to manage this waste.

These profit-obsessed capitalists were monumentally incompetent in overseeing this lucrative contract.

For years union officials raised concerns about their mismanagement of Britain’s radioactive legacy. Now the critical work undertaken at Sellafield has finally been renationalised by the government.

No mainstream political party normally talks about renationalising public services. Former Labour MP Richard Caborn even gave advice to the corporations forming NMP and later became a non-executive board member for the firm. This is yet another example of the failure of privatisation.

No trust

The bosses running the three corporations in NMP are not the type of people that we would entrust our library books to, let alone nuclear waste. One influential board member of URS Corporation Joseph W. Ralston, was vice chair of the US Government’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (1996-2000) and is now a director of global war-profiteer Lockheed Martin.

Help us fight to renationalise vital utilities and public services, and work towards creating a socialist society where the future is controlled by us the workers, not the fat-cat profiteers who are destroying our lives.