Guesstimates

August 28th, 2008

Views: 750

Posted by ChrisG at 11:08 am

An interesting article by Tom Burke over at Prospect (via Nuclear Reaction), which focuses on the economic obstacles to the bold new nuclear future:

There are only two honest answers to the question of how much it costs to build a nuclear power station. These are “I don’t know” and “I’ll tell you when I’ve built it.” Everything else is a guess.

And, we might add, that goes in spades for (a) how much it costs to decommission one, and (b) to deal with the waste it produces. As Burke notes, the UK Government has effectively opted, on the latter issue, for backsliding away from the “operator pays” promise to promising yet another uncosted subsidy.

By 2008 this had mutated into the more nuanced: “The government will [set] a fixed unit price [for] waste disposal at the time when approvals for the station are given.” This effectively caps the costs of nuclear waste disposal to the operator and transfers the risk of cost overruns on to the taxpayer.