By Ben, senior nuclear campaigner.
As a closet power ballad fan, when I heard that the taxpayers' bill for cleaning up our existing piles of nuclear waste is skyrocketing (according to the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Agency, or NDA), I couldn't help but think of hard rockin' übergroup Whitesnake's "Here I go again".
Almost every time the nuclear industry gives an estimation of their costs, whether it be for building reactors, pulling them down, storing waste or somehow disposing of it, they have this very predictable habit of spiraling higher and higher, usually in very short order.
In an article in the papers yesterday, the NDA say that the cost of cleaning up Britain's existing nuclear sites has risen by a whopping 16 per cent in the last year alone. They now reckon it will cost a staggering £73bn. And what's worse is that, because there are probably further costs to be added to this already not insubstantial figure, the final bill is likely to be up to £100bn. That’s nearly as much as the entire NHS budget. Just imagine what we could do in terms of renewables, decentralised energy and energy efficiency with all that cash. Yet Gordon Brown's latest wheeze is to build even more reactors and, presumably, leave the taxpayer to pick up that ever-increasing tab to clean up after them.
