The management of Sellafield, Britain’s key nuclear reprocessing site, will go into private hands on Friday when a contract to run the site is awarded.

One company and three consortia have been battling for the contract - one of the biggest ever awarded by the Government. They are CH2M Hill, the US engineering group bidding on its own; Areva of France in partnership with Britain’s Amec and the US’s Washington Group; the US’s Fluor bidding with Japan’s Toshiba; and Bechtel and Babcock and Wilcox of the US bidding with the UK’s Serco.

Reprocessing and clean-up work at the site in Cumbria will be worth sales of around £1.3 billion a year and the contract is expected to run for an initial five years. But there could be a clause to extend the term much further.

The Sellafield contract is the jewel in the crown of the Government’s break-up of the last state-owned nuclear operations. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, the government umbrella body managing the nuclear sites, will retain ownership of the land and assets, however.

The new managers of Sellafield will take the reins at a difficult time for industrial relations. Unions have rejected a 2 per cent pay increase after enjoying above inflation rises in previous years. They are now set to ballot for strike action among the 10,000 workers which could potentially bring nuclear clean-up work to a standstill.

The NDA made recommendations to the Government on the preferred bidder for the site after an exhaustive process. The final decision was taken by John Hutton, the Business Secretary.

Greenpeace has raised concerns about the contract going to an overseas bidder because of fears over access to information.

The estimated cost of decommissioning all the nuclear sites is £73 billion after a number of estimates were revised upwards. Earlier this week the Public Accounts Committee warned that costs could increase further and that the Department for Business could offer no guarantee that taxpayers would not foot the bill.

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