At the UK's largest public sector tech event, the DigiGov Expo 2025 - Simon Tucker, Chair and Managing Director of NDA Archives and Chief Data Officer at the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, alongside Melanie Jane Tegg, Business Development Director at Iron Mountain, presented a compelling session on the monumental challenge of managing information across what may be the longest-running government programme in UK history.
Tucker opened by explaining the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority's remit. Created through the Energy Act 2004, the NDA is a non-departmental public body responsible for cleaning up the UK's earliest nuclear sites. Operating as a group of companies, it collectively employs 16,000 people directly and 40,000 including the supply chain, with an annual spend of £4.3 billion. The NDA currently manages 17 sites across the UK at various stages of decommissioning, including Sellafield, which holds the largest radioactive inventory and the most complex facilities to decommission in the country. Current plans indicate it will take more than 100 years to complete the core mission, with the ultimate goal of achieving end state at all sites by 2125.
Tucker characterised the NDA's information governance challenges in two words: scale and complexity. To illustrate the scale, he displayed an aerial photograph of Sellafield in West Cumbria, a site so vast that the nearby town of 6,000 people appears dwarfed in comparison. "I think you get some idea of how big that site is. It is enormous," he observed.
The complexity runs deeper than physical size. Sellafield began operations in the 1940s, commissioned by Winston Churchill to create an atomic bomb. In 1956, it generated the world's first commercially viable nuclear electricity. This long history creates layers of organisational complexity, having been owned successively by the Ministry of Supply, UKAEA, British Nuclear Fuels, and now the NDA. "For those government colleagues who are familiar with the machinery of government, that creates complexity when you're talking about records and data and how you look after these things over the very long term," Tucker explained.
The temporal scope is staggering: for Sellafield alone, the facilities will continue operating for another century, then require an additional 100 years to transform into a brownfield site, 180 years in total. "Relatively unique when you think about it in terms of a programme or a project," Tucker remarked.
The sites handle incredibly sensitive information, holding the highest protectively marked information in the country at top secret with atomic information caveats. Yet as a public body, the NDA is subject to the Freedom of Information Act and Environmental Information Regulations. "How do you manage top secret records that are potentially available to the public?" Tucker asked, highlighting one of many contradictions the organisation must navigate.
As a heavily regulated industry, the NDA faces another tension: regulatory obligations require keeping information for 30 years or more, whilst statutory obligations suggest disposing of information as soon as practicable, except for public records, which theoretically must be kept forever.
The scale of the legacy records problem is immense. At Sellafield alone, there are over 100,000 linear metres of paper records. "We've been doing it for 20 years and I reckon we've got another 15 years ahead of us," Tucker stated.
Central to the presentation was the concept of information resilience, building the capacity to preserve and access critical records over extraordinary timeframes. Tucker emphasised that this resilience must be embedded into everything the organisation does, given 80 years of legacy and 100 years of future programme ahead.
A crucial point: even records that are 80 years old and perhaps not particularly well-managed over that period could still be operational records required for another 80 to 100 years. This reality demands a different approach to records management.
The session revealed that Nucleus, the purpose-built facility in Wick, Caithness, Scotland, that opened to the public in 2018, is not actually an archive, despite common perception. "I called it an archive. I wish I hadn't, 'cause it isn't. It's a records management service," Tucker admitted. The facility, managed through a commercial partner agreement with Iron Mountain, employs approximately 60 staff and is designed to operate for nearly 100 years.
Tucker outlined several critical elements of building information resilience. Not all records are equal: the organisation must consider security classifications, vital records (particularly waste package records for nuclear waste), and the astonishing requirement to maintain some records for 10,000 years, the current thinking for how long nuclear waste will remain in geological disposal facilities. "We've gotta keep some records for 10,000 years about what is in that hole in the ground. And that's not something we can do on our own. We need specialist partners to be able to help us to do that," he explained.
Digitisation and digitalisation are absolutely critical: there is no information resilience without building these capabilities into strategies, policies, and projects. However, the NDA faces the challenge of five companies trying to work together with different information and data architectures, different IT systems, and different rules about data on those systems.
On the topic of artificial intelligence, a recurring theme throughout the conference, Tucker offered a note of caution: "AI's gonna fix the world, isn't it? I hope it does and I hope it can solve some of our problems. I'm just not convinced that we can throw AI at a lot of our problems until we've got the data and those records in a form that it can actually make sense. Because otherwise you're just gonna get nonsense coming out the other end and in our case, nonsense that could kill you."
The session highlighted the strategic partnership between the NDA and Iron Mountain, which Tegg described as combining decades of archival expertise with a deep understanding of the importance and value of preserving and protecting the NDA's most valuable assets, whether paper, digital, or historical artefacts.
The partnership began in July 2023 when Iron Mountain won a tender to provide group-wide services. Iron Mountain had previously provided similar services to Sellafield for 19 years, making the expanded contract a natural evolution. The partnership is positioned as a centre of excellence for managing knowledge, information, and heritage, with a focus on continual improvement and driving innovation. Crucially, Iron Mountain's involvement extends beyond simply storing records: it's about unlocking value from the data, protecting the NDA's reputation in world-leading decommissioning, and driving future value through shared services and business development opportunities.
Tucker was candid about the rationale for partnership: "We recognised early on that we can't do this alone. We do not have the skills in the civil nuclear industry to be able to solve these challenges." The goal is to develop operations at Nucleus not only as a centre of excellence for the NDA group but as a potential shared service for government more broadly.
Tucker questioned why, having created something on behalf of government to meet the NDA's obligations, the service couldn't be extended to others outside the NDA group. The organisation has gone to considerable effort to meet statutory and regulatory obligations, and many others are still on that journey. "We've got the framework and the strategies and the policies to do that and even the infrastructure to be able to do that," he noted.
The facility could double in size, with eight temperature-controlled repositories currently in operation. The NDA is already providing some services to other government clients and actively seeking to expand this offering.
However, Tucker was realistic about financial pressures: "Like other government colleagues, it's a bit tough at the moment for money, right? And these things are not cheap and we are hardly ever a top priority." AI now commands the spotlight, and whilst Tucker acknowledged it as important for the vision and future with genuine potential, he remained the voice cautioning that "until you solve all of these other problems, it will not deliver what you think it'll deliver."
Tucker shared his favourite photograph from the NDA's extensive collection: a 1954 image from Sellafield showing technology being built that is still used in the nuclear industry today, 71 years later. The French nuclear electricity programme is based on technology that facility developed. Yet the same photograph shows a crane positioned above a man wearing a flat cap-health and safety did not exist in the 1950s-and another man descending 60 metres underwater in a "godawful contraption," fed oxygen through a pipe and secured by what Tucker described as an "extremely flaky rope attached to a piece of metal."
"That's why this is my favourite photo because it talks about the challenges we are still dealing with now. No health and safety, no records management and legacy situations on those 17 sites that we frankly sometimes don't even know what we are going to get when we open a door," he explained.
Looking forward, Tucker positioned the UK at the forefront of nuclear decommissioning globally. Thirty-one countries have benefited from nuclear power over the last 80 years, and more are expected given growing energy security concerns. The UK, with the NDA leading this work, is well-positioned to exploit knowledge and skills in decommissioning, and Tucker wants information governance services to be an enabler of that expertise export.
The organisation faces cutting-edge challenges in digital preservation, with representation on the board of the Digital Preservation Coalition. Tucker noted strong international relationships, particularly with Japan, but acknowledged a gap: "I don't think we've worked hard enough on our relationships in the UK within government. You are all facing many of the challenges that I'm facing, and I haven't spoken to you about it."
The session concluded with an invitation to collaboration. Because Tucker wants to create a shared service with Iron Mountain's assistance, he extended an offer to government colleagues: "Come and talk to me. We've done a lot of this already. By no means perfect, by no means fixed yet, but we are on a very long journey, and I think we're doing it quite well. So, I'd love to talk to government colleagues about how we can do it better together."
It was a presentation that bridged past and future, demonstrating that sometimes the most critical digital transformation challenge isn't implementing the latest AI: it's ensuring the foundational data architecture can support decisions that matter not just for years or decades, but for millennia.