As is the case with all the major nuclear powers, the U.K. has to deal with some sites that have major radioactive pollution left over from their development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons. The U.K. Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) just published a report in which it announced that the estimated cost of decommissioning old nuclear sites in the U.K. has actually gone down a little bit which is very welcome and very unusual. The cleanup program covers seventeen old sites. The NDA owns the contaminated sites and is responsible for planning the decommissioning work. The actual work will be carried out by Site Licensed Companies under contract to the NDA.
The estimation of costs for the project covers decommissioning and dismantling the reactors, tearing down the buildings, dealing with the disposal of all the wastes and restoration of the land which is referred to as remediation. The proposal also includes costs of continuing to operate new nuclear power plants and the fuel reprocessing facilities at Sellafield. The current estimate for the decommissioning project is one hundred and fifty four billion dollars over the next one hundred and twenty years.
The NDA said that " Decommissioning many of these facilities will continue well into the 22nd century. Over this timescale, plans and forecasts will be affected by technology improvements, changes in government policy, economic circumstances and environmental issues. The figure is updated annually but should be regarded as an informed estimate that depends on assumptions about future developments and lies within a range of possible figures."
Currently, the NDA is spending about four billion dollars a year on the decommissioning project. Two thirds of this cost is borne by the U.K. government and the other third is covered by revenues from NDA commercial contracts for managing and reprocessing spent nuclear fuel.
The NDA admits that there are many uncertainties about future costs for decommissioning. While the work requirements and technologies are well known for some sites, there are other sites where it is very difficult to accurately assess what the costs of cleanup might be.
As a matter of fact, I would say that such uncertainties render any estimate of the cost of a hundred and twenty year project involving unspecified problems and non-existent future technologies a shot in the dark at best. In light of these problems, the NDA has published a range of estimates that vary from one hundred and twenty five billion dollars to two hundred and ninety billion dollars which puts their preferred estimate of one hundred and fifty four billion at the low end of the range of estimates.
In addition to the obvious issues of unknown problems that may arise at particular sites and the fact that some new technologies will have to be developed, there are broader problems regarding politics and economics. The estimation of decommissioning costs rests on the assumption that current political institutions will continue to exist and that the current economic system will also continue. If there are major disruptions caused by social instability, war, economic collapse, environmental collapse or totally unforeseen problems, then the necessary political institutions and economic resources may not exist for the one hundred and twenty years required to carry out the NDA plan for decommissioning. In a worst case scenario, total social collapse might leave radioactively contaminated sites unprotected to endanger the ecosystem and public health.
