Deactivation, Decommissioning and Dismantling: Are there any lessons to be learned?

Most of the energy infrastructures need to be dismantled at the end of their operations. Among these, Nuclear Decommissioning Projects and Programmes (NDPs) are characterized by high complexity, several risks, long schedules, and cost estimates that globally lie in the range of hundreds of billions of pounds. The budget for NDPs is subject to well publicized increases and, due to NDPs’ relatively recent emergence, complexity and variety, key stakeholders lack a full understanding of the key factors influencing these factors. Project management literature has, until now, mainly focused on new build and only in the last decades the issues of decommissioning (mega)projects has arisen. To respond to this changing environment, project management will need to understand the challenges of decommissioning projects. Benchmarking offers significant potential to improve the performance of project selection, planning and delivery. However, until now, it has only been partially used and there is a huge gap in the literature concerning benchmarking NDPs. This paper adapts a top-down benchmarking approach to highlight the NDPs characteristics that mostly impact on the NDPs performance. The ultimate aim is to gain a better overview of national and international best practices, from which the UK nuclear decommissioning industry can develop guidelines to ameliorate its own performance.