Decommissioning nuclear reactors – costing $billions

a new decommissioning industry is growing very rapidly.

The attraction for the industry is the enormous amount of taxpayers’ money that will have to be found to deal with the problem. Already the British Government is spending £3 billion (about AUD $5.57 billion) a year across 19 sites, just to begin a process that is expected to cost £100 billion. That is the Government’s own estimated cost of dismantling the old power plants, with the added cost of disposing of the waste.

Nuclear waste gets expensive Independent Australia,14 Feb 14 When countries embrace nuclear power to combat climate change the problem of disposing of the radioactive waste seems far away, but the costs will be enormous.Paul Brown from Climate News Network reports…….All governments who have nuclear power stations have to deal with practicalities and have a problem that so far is unresolved: how to get rid of all the radioactive waste their existing nuclear plants have produced.It is a contentious issue even in countries that are phasing out nuclear power, like Germany, because no communities want to be blighted by being a nation’s nuclear waste dump. But it is worse for countries that share this unresolved nuclear waste problem yet want to add to it by building a new generation of power stations.

An example is Britain, where the Government stated four years ago it was unacceptable to build a new generation of atomic power stations while having no depository to get rid of the existing waste.

It was confident its Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) would solve the problem of old power stations and increasing quantities of badly stored radioactive waste. The NDA has failed to do so. The stumbling block has been that, so far, no community in the United Kingdom has been prepared to accept a waste depository.

With 20 nuclear reactors already closed down because they are no longer economic or have safety problems, the issue is becoming urgent — but there is still no solution in sight…….

Across Europe and North America, the problem of decommissioning existing stations is huge and the cost astronomical. As a result a new decommissioning industry is growing very rapidly.

Across Europe, there are 144 reactors in operation, of which one third will have started their decommissioning process by 2025. There is enough work to keep thousands of people employed for more than a century.

The International Atomic Energy Agency estimates that the total value of the decommissioning and waste management market is £250 bn (AUD $464 bn) — a figure that is bound to rise.

Suitable venue

In May, 200 of the world’s senior nuclear experts and waste management executives will meet to discuss progress in this difficult area.

The meeting, in Manchester in England, is being held close to Sellafield, which has one of the most intractable nuclear waste problems on the planet. It has dozens of disused nuclear facilities dating back to the 1950s, heavily contaminated with plutonium and other dangerous nuclear substances.

Meanwhile it continues to reprocess spent nuclear fuel for European and Japanese utilities with no clear plan about what to do with the associated high-level waste. Whatever happens, the site will take more than a century to make safe.

Although the industry gathering in Manchester will see the nuclear cleanup as a business opportunity, some British politicians are angered at the apparent incompetence, delays and rising costs of the companies involved.

Margaret Hodge, chairwoman of the House of Commons’ powerful Public Accounts Committee, said the costs of cleaning up Sellafield were rising to “astonishing levels”.

She accused the private company hired to clean up the site, Nuclear Management Partners, of missed targets, delays and cost over-runs, and her committee has demanded that the company …..

a grim warning:

“It may be that disposal is not, after all, technically feasible or ethically acceptable. Meanwhile new nuclear build is threatening to give us and generations yet to come a future nuclear waste problem of disastrous proportions.”http://www.independentaustralia.net/environment/environment-display/nuclear-waste-gets-expensive,6168