The cost of taking nuclear plants out of service is spiralling out of
control. Is this just poor financial management, or does it have wider
implications? Written by Greenpeace Executive Director John Sauven for comment is free.
This week, the National Audit Office released its damning assessment of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority's (NDA) ability to estimate the true financial cost of decommissioning and cleaning up the UK's fleet of ailing reactors and contaminated facilities. As costs for decommissioning appear to spiral out of control - rising sharply from £56bn to £73bn over just a few years - the burden on the taxpayer grows ever more. And it doesn't end there. The NDA has also been made responsible for disposing of the UK's stockpile of legacy wastes which is estimated at an additional £10-20bn. The industry argues these increased costs have arisen in the face of "significant challenges", but the echoes from this announcement are all too familiar from a sector that has been plagued with industrial and financial incompetence.
Although NDA has only a short history, it has not been a happy one. Three weeks after it was created in April 2005, the spent fuel reprocessing plant at Thorp (at Sellafield) was shut down following the discovery of a leak of dissolved spent fuel. It had been leaking for nine months. Despite recent false promises of a restart, rather embarrassingly it still remains shut, with technical problems being cited. And it doesn't end there. In addition, unexpected problems with waste have been found, mainly at Sellafield, which has meant diverting more money away from other decommissioning and clean-up operations (for example, cracks at the UK's Magnox reactors). It's a mess and it could cost us billions.
But is this just a case of poor financial management and short-sightedness, or does this have wider implications for the industry?
It's a vital question because the same nuclear industry people and
bureaucrats who totally underestimated the clean up costs for current
nuclear plants are in charge of consultation on how much the next lot
of reactors - and their wastes - might cost to deal with. In fact, the
NDA is the lead agency in this! They will also have a central role in
estimating the costs - over the next 150 years - of how much it might
cost to dispose of new build wastes. The NDA's recent and woefully
inadequate cost estimates for nuclear waste management won't provide
any comfort to the taxpayer or provide any confidence in their waste
management strategy. And remember - the same legislation that
established the NDA also contains clauses which allow the government to
direct the authority to take over managing and financing new build
wastes.
So much for there being no possibility of future subsidies for new reactors.
The NAO's examination of the NDA should be a valuable lesson learnt and
should serve as a warning to us all - that the government's irrational,
ill-conceived and bloody-minded policy of supporting new nuclear
reactors has been pushed forward while a solution to the radioactive
waste issue still doesn't exist. Meanwhile the NDA is handing out
millions of pounds of taxpayers' money to private companies because of
badly designed contracts, and the cost of decommissioning nuclear
facilities is rising. We've spent tens of billions on this already, and
we're set to spend billions more dealing with the existing problem - to
build a new generation of new reactors is pure folly.
