The sale of BNG was a "positive strategic move", said BNFL's chief executive Michael Parker.

Trade and Industry Secretary Alan Johnson said he believed a competitive sale was in the best commercial interest for BNFL.

"By bringing in external expertise more quickly, it also contributes to improved clean-up performance for the NDA and is therefore good for the taxpayer," Mr Johnson said.

Of course, the government, which is supposed to regulate waste, set the parameters for decommissioning, supervise the work and pay for the whole thing, does not have all the expertise in that sector. That's heartening to read, isn't it?

And the more expert (and numerous, highly competitive) outsiders are, of course, going to quote to the government the best price around, and the government, expertise-less, will know that it's indeed the best offer, right?

In fact...

The sale of Britain's nuclear giant (BBC)

State-owned British Nuclear Fuels' (BNFL) decision to sell its clean-up subsidiary is unlike any other commercial transaction ever undertaken.

Not only will the sale of British Nuclear Group (BNG) decimate its parent company, which will be left with just a few hundred workers. It will also fail to raise much cash.

Offers in the region of £1bn ($1.7bn) are expected when the auction starts sometime early next year, analysts say. Hence the income from the actual sale will do little to bolster the Treasury's coffers.

(...)

In other words; the people who buy BNG will not acquire a company in the conventional sense.

They will not become the owner of any assets, nor will they become a permanent employer of BNG's current staff. They are basically buying a contract.

"The people who actually work on the site will move to the new owner [of the contract]," explains Sir Anthony in an interview with the BBC News website.

So, the contract doesn't change. The workers don't change. The "assets" (i.e. the waste and other bits of the plants to be dismantled) will not be owned by the company, which will naturally not take over any responsibility for it.

But the contract will be run for a profit. How do you make a profit on an existing contract? Let's see...

• finance yourself more cheaply than the previous operator? Nope. The private sector still pays more than the government to borrow;
• pay workers less. Hmmm. Would they really do that?

• cut corners on safety. That will happen only if the government - through the relevant regulatory agency, in this case presumably the NDA, lets them do it. But now that they've dumped the day-to-day running to the private sector, are they really going to be around to do it?

• be more "efficient". That's the one that's supposed to justify the whole rigmarole of privatisation. No needless bureacracy, focus on results, business discipline, etc... I suppose it depends on how tightly defined the tasks are under the "contract", but this is a sector where you'd expect specifications to be pretty damn prescriptive and tight, thus leaving little leeway to the operator. So either you have little efficiency, or you have a loose contract, which, considering what it's about, is not so reassuring.

• pay bosses less. (Bwahaha). Now that might work...

The sad thing is that getting some tasks done by the private sector used to be called "contracting" or "subcontracting". You hire external expertise to do a very specific job you have defined and you supervise the result - and you keep full responsibility for it.

The big issue with this "privatisation" is that it seems to want to muddle the issue of responsibility. It appears to solve the problem of waste, to transfer responsibility to someone competent (and efficient) when in fact the government really keeps the ultimate responsibility, of course, and probably loses some amount of supervision of the work in the meanwhile.

But hey, it brings in some cash, it's in line with l'air du temps (privatisation = good, State ownership = bad), and hopefully for this government, it pushes the real issues far enough into the future that it will be someone else's problem - and that they can in the meanwhile decide to build spanking new nuclear plants and claim to be working to "solve the energy crisis".

As I wrote before, the only way for nuclear to make sense is if the investment is made by the government, because the single most important cost item in a nuclear plant is the cost of financing. Both the interest rate you use and the duration of the investment have a huge impact on the cost of the nuclear kWh. Without sovereign debt pricing, nuclear has no chance in hell of being cheaper. With it, let's say that the debate is still open. It seems possible, like in France, to have an overall cost (including, in principle, decommissioning and waste management) that is pretty low thanks to a fully integrated, centralised State-owned, State-planned and State-supervised and mostly well-run nuclear industry (because engineers are in charge, not managers, and workers are well paid and trained to actually care about security). But take out any item (centralisation, supervision, integration, focus on security, State ownership) and the economics of nuclear become pretty dubious.

Nuclear waste will ALWAYS end up being the responsibility of the State. Nuclear security will ALWAYS be the responsibility of the State, and regulation of nuclear operators will always done by a government agency whether the operators are public or private.

Nuclear know-how must thus always remain in the hands of State bodies at least as much as in that of private operators, if they exist. Why bother with the private sector, then?

Nuclear energy in private hands makes no sense.