nuclear-news

Naked Capitalism, By John Daly, a non-resident scholar at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and chief analyst at OilPrice. Cross posted from OilPrice   20 Febv 13

Many of the civilian nuclear power plants built in the US. and Western Europe during the halcyon days of the Eisenhower administration are coming to the end of their operational lives as their operating licenses expire.

The looming deadlines leave their operators with two stark choices – apply for a license extension beyond the original forty years, or decommission.

A bad choice, however you look at it. For a license extension, aging NPPs must upgrade, while decommissioning raises the primordial question sidestepped since the dawn of the civilian nuclear age – what to do with the radioactive debris? The British imbroglio.

The predicted cost of decommissioning Sellafield nuclear facility in Cumbria, Britain’s largest nuclear complex, is now estimated at an eye-watering $104.3 billion over the next three decades, a figure that inexorably year by year continues to rise and represents over $1,546 for every man, woman and child in the British Isles.

Sellafield is a nuclear reprocessing site, close to the village of Seascale on the British coast of the Irish Sea in Cumbria, England, a subsidiary of the original nuclear reactor site at Windscale, which, along with neighboring Calder Hall, is undergoing decommissioning and dismantling of its four nuclear power generating reactors.

Now, the aging facility, one of the first established under the Eisenhower’s administration’s civilian “atoms for peace” program, is due for decommissioning.

So, where to store the nuclear waste?…

seven charges [against the company managing Sellafield ] were subsequently brought by Britain’s Environment Agency and the Office for Nuclear Regulation following an investigation into “multiple failures” involving the incorrect disposal of low-level radioactive waste.

What remains unsaid that the court case is where the more than $104 billion to decommission Sellafield will come from, much less where the nuclear debris will reside after the facility is offline. The British electorate deserves answers to the questions.

Across the Pond, Florida’s Progress Energy’s Crystal River 3 Nuclear Power Plant is also in the process of being decommissioned. Not only for consumers but those living nearby, the decisions regarding Sellafield’s decommissioning are likely to reverberate across the Atlantic.
Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/02/who-will-pay-for-nuclear-power-plant-cleanup.html#tVg2dh3ZGiE6ODZd.99