The International Energy Agency (IEA) said last year that about half of the four hundred and thirty four existing power reactors around the world will be shut down by the year 2040. The cost of decommissioning these two hundred reactors was estimated to be about one hundred billion dollars. The head of the IEA said that this cost was a rough estimate and that the cost could well be twice as much. He admitted that the cost of decommissioning of reactors could vary by a factor of four. Other experts say that these estimate are far too low because they do not include permanent disposal of the spent nuclear fuel assemblies from the reactors.
Decommissioning costs decades in the future will vary greatly by specific reactor and specific country. The exact cost of decommissioning will depend on the reactor type, size and location. The availability of proper disposal facilities and the condition of the reactor at the time of decommissioning will be important. And after all the costs of decommissioning have been assessed, there will still be additional costs depending on the future intended use of the site of the reactor. Technology for decommissioning may become cheaper in the future. However, disposal of spent nuclear fuel will most likely become more expensive as time goes by.
In the United States, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has estimated that the cost of decommissioning the one hundred nuclear power reactors in the U.S. at around three hundred million to four hundred million dollars each but some reactors may cost a great deal more. The NRC mandates that reactor owners maintain a fund that will be sufficient to decommission all the reactors that they own. The NRC is currently saying that twenty operating U.S. reactors do not have a fund big enough to decommission them. I think that this U.S. estimate is far too low.
France has fifty eight operating reactors and the French government says that their cost of decommissioning will be somewhere around thirty five billion dollars. This amounts to about six hundred billion dollars per reactor. It seems that the French estimate is much too low.
Germany is shutting down and decommissioning all of their seventeen nuclear reactors because of the Fukushima disaster. Germany estimates the cost of decommissioning them at over two billion dollars each. This appears to be far more realistic that other estimates in this post.
Japan is engaged in restarting its forty eight nuclear power reactors after all were shut down following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. They estimate that the cost of decommissioning will be thirty billion dollars which would amount to about six hundred million dollars per reactor, around the same estimate as France. Both these estimates are much too low.
Russia has thirty three nuclear power reactors and estimates that it will cost between five hundred million and a billion dollars per reactor. This estimate is probably too low.
My great fear is that there will not be enough money available when the time come to decommission some of the world's nuclear power reactors. Initially, the companies that own power reactors may not have the money and will throw the burden back on the taxpayers in particular countries. Given the current unstable condition of the global economic system, the governments may not have the money. The reactors may simply be shut off and boarded up eventually leaking radioactive material out into the environment and threatening public health.
