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       Three trends are having a serious impact on the nuclear power sector. First, the growth of renewable power sources combined with their falling costs have reduced investor interest in nuclear power. Second, the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, Japan in March of 2011 shuttered a number of nuclear power plants until expensive safety upgrades could be made. Third, many operating nuclear power plants were built in the 1970s and have reached the end of their originally licensed lifespans. Some are being licensed for an additional twenty to forty years, but others are just too expensive to be maintained.
        Due to the three trends listed above, there is now a growing market in decommissioning nuclear power plants. It has been estimated that the global decommissioning market will grow by five percent during from 2018 to 2025. About one hundred and ten commercial power reactors, forty-eight prototype reactors, over two hundred and fifty research reactors and a number of fuel cycle facilities were out of operation by September of 2017. It takes a long time to dismantle and safely dispose of plant components and spent nuclear fuel as well as other radioactive materials. A new market report says that the number of shut down nuclear facilities will increase further in the next five years.
       European Union countries have been at the forefront of this abandonment of nuclear energy. Following the Fukushima disaster, Germany decided to shut down all of their nuclear power reactors as soon as possible. France, which depends on nuclear power for three quarters of its electricity has plans to reduce that dependence to only fifty percent of their electrical generation. They intend to close down seventeen nuclear power stations by 2025. The U.S. has more nuclear power reactors that any other country. It has already decommissioned ten nuclear power plants and twenty more are scheduled for decommissioning.
      Seventy-six nuclear reactors are expected to be retired between 2015 and 2019. One hundred and eighty-three units are scheduled for retirement during the 2020s. In Europe, the nuclear decommission market is expected to grow by thirty percent between 2018 and 2022.
      India has a guideline established by their Atomic Energy Regulatory Board to start decommissioning some of their nuclear power reactors but have not yet start to do so.
       The Nuclear Power Corp of India Ltd. (NCPI) is the only nuclear energy producer in India. They collect a “decommissioning levy” from ratepayers to finance future decommissioning. The fund is collected and managed by the Department of Nuclear Energy. It currently contains about three hundred and sixty-five million dollars. The Indian Prime Minister told the Indian Parliament in 2012 that India does not want to create a hard cap for the life of a nuclear power plant. However, he said that India has comprehensive capabilities to decommission and the country has already decommissioned a couple of research reactors. The Prime Minister had been the head of the Indian Department of Atomic Energy before he assumed the position of Prime Minister.
     Some companies such as Holtec are already purchasing nuclear reactors that they intend to decommission. They have experience and technology that they believe will allow them to decommission reactors at a much lower cost than other companies competing for the decommissioning market.