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Nuclear Gets Expensive: the Astonishing Cost of Radioactive Waste

Sunday, February 23, 2014 16:05

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(Before It's News)

By Paul Brown

Guest Writer for Wake Up World

When countries embrace nuclear power to combat climate change, the problem of disposing of the radioactive waste seems far away, but the costs will be enormous.

Nothing divides environmental campaigners as much as nuclear power.

Some have always believed renewables offer cleaner power while avoiding the dangers of radioactivity and nuclear waste disposal. Others, including new converts who now support the industry, believe the threat of climate change is so terrifying that the drawbacks to nuclear power are far outweighed by its potential for producing large quantities of low-carbon electricity.

All governments who have nuclear power stations have to deal with practicalities and have a problem that so far is unresolved: how to get rid of all the radioactive waste their existing nuclear plants have produced.

It is a contentious issue even in countries that are phasing out nuclear power, like Germany, because no communities want to be blighted by being a nation’s nuclear waste dump. But it is worse for countries that share this unresolved nuclear waste problem yet want to add to it by building a new generation of power stations.

An example is Britain, where the Government stated four years ago it was unacceptable to build a new generation of atomic power stations while having no depository to get rid of the existing waste.

It was confident its Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) would solve the problem of old power stations and increasing quantities of badly stored radioactive waste. The NDA has failed to do so. The stumbling block has been that, so far, no community in the United Kingdom has been prepared to accept a waste depository.

With 20 nuclear reactors already closed down because they are no longer economic or have safety problems, the issue is becoming urgent — but there is still no solution in sight.

A century’s work

Despite these problems, ministers have decided the issue of climate change is so pressing that Britain must carry on building nuclear power stations, even though its plans to bury the waste have been postponed for at least half a century.

But while Britain is one of the few old industrialised countries that want to build new nuclear stations, many developing countries – including India, China and Vietnam – are keen to meet increasing energy demand with this technology.

They might do well to look at the issues they will face.

Across Europe and North America, the problem of decommissioning existing stations is huge and the cost astronomical. As a result a new decommissioning industry is growing very rapidly.

The attraction for the industry is the enormous amount of taxpayers’ money that will have to be found to deal with the problem. Already the British Government is spending £3 billion (about AUD $5.57 billion) a year across 19 sites, just to begin a process that is expected to cost £100 billion. That is the Government’s own estimated cost of dismantling the old power plants, with the added cost of disposing of the waste.

Across Europe, there are 144 reactors in operation, of which one third will have started their decommissioning process by 2025. There is enough work to keep thousands of people employed for more than a century.

The International Atomic Energy Agency estimates that the total value of the decommissioning and waste management market is £250 bn (AUD $464 bn) — a figure that is bound to rise.