EnergySolutions, the Utah-based nuclear waste service company, has dropped a bid to manage the controversial Sellafield nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in England.

Sellafield, at Cumbria on the Irish Sea, has been in the headlines because of past discharges of radioactive cesium into the sea. Although danger to the public was rated as low, the plant was shut down in April 2005 when a pipe was found to have leaked badly.

Last year, British regulators said metal fatigue caused the failure and that about 83 cubic meters of "highly radioactive and corrosive" liquid ran into a secondary containment pool.

In an Internet posting Wednesday, the United Kingdom's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority says Jacobs Engineering Group as well as EnergySolutions withdrew from competition for the contract.

Greg Hopkins, EnergySolutions' senior vice president for communications, said the company pre-qualified for three significant jobs in England.

Running Sellafield was one. The $10 billion, five-year contract would have been with a branch of the British government.

But according to an EnergySolutions press release, the company is also pre-qualified for contracts to a manage the United Kingdom's national low-level radioactive waste repository near Drigg, Cumbria, and to decommission reactor sites in the U.K.

That doesn't mean EnergySolutions is not interested in any possible activity at Sellafield. Mark Walker, spokesman for the company in Salt Lake City, said, "There are subcontractor opportunities at the Sellafield site down the road."

What the company withdrew from, he added, was a contract to "actually manage the Sellafield site."

Hopkins said the company decided "that we ought to focus our attention on two of the three jobs," and work on preparing bids on the two.

The company's future and operations in Utah had nothing to do with the decision, he said. "This was strictly a U.K.-based business decision."

Hopkins said it seemed unlikely that a single company would win all three of the bids, and EnergySolutions chose to focus on two of them.

In the past, EnergySolutions was strongly supportive of the idea of nuclear fuel reprocessing. The company maintained that reprocessing would reduce the volume of nuclear waste that needs to be stored.

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