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UK nuclear clean-up costs up a third to Pnds 73 billion

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

London, July 10, IRNA
UK-Nuclear
The cost of cleaning up Britain's old nuclear power stations has risen by almost a third in the past five years and could be set to increase further, MPs warned Thursday.

The parliamentary Public Accounts Committee reported that the latest estimates, made in 2007 by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), put the cost of decommissioning the UK's 19 public sector nuclear sites at Pnds 73 billion (Dlrs 140 bn).

The report also warned there was no certainty that the clear-up costs associated with the recently announced new generation of power stations would be carried by their private owners.

Environmentalist group Greenpeace has claimed that the cost of nuclear decommissioning would be closer to Pnds 100 bn because there would be a Pnds 10 bn bill for the disposal of legacy waste and a further Pnds 9 bn to get rid of uranium, plutonium and spent fuel.

The all-party committee accepted that the NDA had difficulties of a 50-year legacy of deferred decision making, faced uncertainty about how much it could earn from ageing facilities that were still open, and unexpected problems at Sellafield recycling plant.

But it also identified areas where cost escalations could have been avoided, such as short-term changes to the decommissioning programme.

Committee chairman Edward Leigh described the size of the bill as an "enormous" amount of money and said the MPs "cannot be confident, however, that even this figure will not be significantly upped when the estimates are next revised."

But a spokesman for the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (DBERR) said the government had "always acknowledged that the cost estimate would increase in the short-term as the NDA gained greater understanding of what it is dealing with".

Leigh said that there were important lessons to be learnt from the experience so far, including that when new nuclear facilities are built, "plans for decommissioning them should be already in place."

When it announced plans for new nuclear power stations in January, the government said that the investing energy companies would be responsible for the full cost of decommissioning new facilities and their full share of waste management costs.

But the committee chairman expressed some concerns about the true position of DBERR, saying the department is "unable to provide complete assurance that the costs of decommissioning new nuclear power stations will not fall back on future taxpayers."
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