Springtime for Nuclear

January 30th, 2008

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Posted by ChrisG at 1:32 pm

Or not, according at least to a new report [PDF, 1.15MB] from the National Audit Office into the scale of costs involved in decommissioning nuclear power stations. This confirms that the uncertainties surrounding them are nowhere near being settled – even for the generation of installations currently nearing or at the end of their useful lives, never mind the Government’s not-even-on-the-drawing-board-yet next generation of ultra-safe, zero-carbon, low-waste new build.

The Department and Authority envisaged that better definition of the decommissioning task would see estimates of remaining lifetime costs grow in the short‑term, but stabilise by 2008 and fall thereafter. The most recent iterations of the Authority’s plans have continued to produce large increases in estimates, including the cost of the work programme over the next five years which might have been expected to have stabilised by now.

Estimates of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority’s costs for the five year period 2008-2013 have gone up by a staggering 41% within a mere two years. These unpredicted increases have themselves led to further unforeseen costs, such as in the need to stop and restart decommissioning procedures at the old Magnox plants. And at this stage, the NDA has no idea exactly what factors have generated these increases, and has an equal degree of understanding of whether or not the uncertainties affecting future cost hikes can be quantified.

So, the last, best hope for climate change apparently rests with massive investment in nuclear power, except (a) no-one knows how long it will take for the private sector to put together viable funding plans together with acceptable planning proposals, (b) no-one therefore knows how long it will take for new plant to be built, (c) this new plant will most likely therefore make no contribution at all to meeting the 2020 CO₂ targets, and finally (and emphatically) (d) it is unlikely that, during the next few years, when the private sector is working out how much financial liability for waste and decommissioning it can bear, the NDA will be able to produce a reliable assessment of the factors that have been pivotal in making the decommissioning costs of the last generation of nukes wildly overshoot (given that no-one, since the advent of civil nuclear power, has managed to this).

The words “attractive environment for investment” don’t exactly spring to mind.