Benchmarking nuclear decommissioning

Historically, project management research on infrastructure has mostly focused on its planning, design, and construction. However, globally, more and more infrastructure, such as nuclear and offshore oil & gas facilities, are reaching the end of life and will soon need to be decommissioned. Decommissioning projects are a new, emerging, unavoidable challenge that project managers are currently facing and will face more and more severely in the future. Primarily due to the relevance of the nuclear sector, this research focuses on Nuclear Decommissioning Projects and Programmes (NDPs), intended as site-level endeavours. NDPs are long and complex projects, whose estimates reach billions. Moreover, the cost estimates of several of these projects keep increasing while there is a limited understanding of why this happens. Triggered by these considerations, this industry-funded research develops and applies a methodology based on benchmarking to investigate the NDP characteristics that affect the NDP performance in terms of cost and time. Due to the NDP small sample size, the limited number, availability of and reliability of data and information on NDPs, and the extremely limited previous research on NDPs, inputs of this research are both secondary data and information, as well as primary ones collected through interviews with experienced practitioners. Outputs of this research include a methodology based on benchmarking that incorporates both qualitative and quantitative analysis, and as well as its application on NDPs. However, this methodology could be applied to other industrial sectors as well. The contribution of this thesis is both methodological and practical as it both develops and applies a methodology to investigate NDPs, highlighting the NDP characteristics that affect the NDP performance to ultimately improve the selection, planning, and delivery of NDPs. Moreover, by introducing the topic of NDPs to the project management community, this thesis lays the path for a number of future research, both in order to address the limitations of the current research, e.g. its focus on European NDPs, as well as to promote the in-depth investigation of each single NDP characteristics that emerged during this study.