Cost of nuclear decommissioning to soar

If you thought building and running nuclear power plants was too expensive, just wait until you have to dispose of them. From Edie.net: The cost of cleaning up the UK's nuclear facilities - some of which date back to the 1950s - looks set to rise above £73bn. A senior official at the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) told the BBC this week that the costs of dismantling 19 sites over the coming years will rise by billions of pounds. Figures from the National Audit Office earlier this year said the estimated cost of decommissioning power sites had risen to £73bn.

Jim Morse, a senior director at the NDA, told the BBC: "I think it's a high probability that in the short term it will undoubtedly go up. "We've still a lot to discover. We haven't started waste retrieval in those parts of the estate where the degradation and radioactive decay has been at its greatest." He estimated that the extra cost would run into billions but admitted that he could not be sure how much the total would be. "No-one's done this before," he added….

A fisherman across the water from the Seabrook power plant in New Hampshire, by Matthew Trump, via Wikimedia Commons, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2