Up To 1,600 Jobs To Be Lost At Magnox Sites

Up to 1,600 jobs are to be lost at 12 Magnox nuclear power sites by September 2016, the company has said.

Eleven of the plants have already shut down and the remaining one in operation - Wylfa on Anglesey in North Wales - is due to stop generating power at the end of the year.

Magnox said that it expected between 1,400 and 1,600 job losses up to September 2016, including staff, agency and contract workers.

"These proposed reductions arise from planned step downs in the work programme at a number of sites and the implementation of a more streamlined operating model for delivering decommissioning," it said in a statement.

"We will seek wherever possible for these reductions to be through voluntary means and we will endeavour to retrain staff in roles where we are currently reliant on agency resources."

The company also said it would try to offer "alternative roles in the wider Cavendish Nuclear/Fluor business", which controls Magnox.

Gary Smith, national secretary for energy for the GMB union, which has some 600 members at Magnox, told Sky News: "Some of these job losses have been planned for quite some time. Others will come as a shock, particularly for the workforce employed on temporary contracts.

"We're pleased that the first tranche of job losses will be on voluntary basis. But this will be a tough time for a lot of Magnox workers."

"Workers in the energy sector had been told that there would be a lot more jobs created, which haven't come to pass."

The 12 nuclear power sites managed by Magnox are: Berkeley, Gloucestershire; Bradwell, Essex; Chapelcross, Dumfriesshire; Dungeness A, Kent; Harwell, Oxfordshire; Hinkley Point A, Somerset; Hunterston A, Ayrshire; Oldbury, Gloucestershire; Sizewell A, Suffolk; Trawsfynydd, North Wales; Winfrith, Dorset; and Wylfa, Anglesey, North Wales.