Shares in Amec ticked up 2 per cent this morning as the project services and engineering group saw many long months of work pay off by clinching the £6.75 billion contract to clean-up Sellafield.

Amec is the British partner in the Nuclear Managment Partners consortium, which also includes Areva, the French nuclear giant, and Washington Group, a US engineering contractor best known for working on the rebuilding of Iraq. The consortium partners have not disclosed their relative stakes, but the consortium is led by a Washington executive.

Still, Amec is likely to receive a hefty fee from the contract which is worth £1.3 billion a year, plus a healthy £50 million in additional fees a year. Initially the contract runs for five years, but could be extended for 17 and the feeling is that having taken this long to award the contract, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, the Government agency which still owns Sellafield's liabilities, would be reluctant to jump horse early into the long clean-up process.

In the last couple of years, Amec has completed its transformation into an oil services provider with more than 60 per cent of its earnings coming from natural resources services, including Canadian Oil Sands.

Securing this long-term nuclear contract gives Amec another string to its bow and a hedge against the volatility of oil price spikes and the cyclical natural resources sector. Nuclear's long-term earnings, with margins that are expected to be stronger than those in oil services, gives the company some welcome balance. This is a business that is enjoying strong momentum at the moment. As concerns over the security of energy supply - whether oil or nuclear - look set to become even more important, Amec is very well placed.

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