Cost of clearing Suffolk nuclear plant set to soar to nearly £1bn

[kristopher]

Cost of clearing Suffolk nuclear plant set to soar to nearly £1bn

EMILY DENNIS

Last updated: 04/10/2010 07:00:00

The estimated cost of clearing the Sizewell A nuclear power station site on the east coast is now a massive £927m, according to new figures.

Taxpayers will pick up most of the bill because the twin reactor plant, as well as 20 other reactors around the country, are state-owned - some by the Ministry of Defence for the production of weapons-grade plutonium.

The cost of decommissioning all of the UK's first-generation Magnox nuclear power stations, together with research facilities and the reprocessing plant at Sellafield in Cumbria, is presently expected to be £37.1billion.

Four years ago, the estimated cost of clearing the decommissioned Sizewell A site was £870m.

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority ...

http://www.edp24.co.uk/content/edp24/news/story.aspx?brand=EDPOnline&category=News&tBrand=EDPOnline&tCategory=xDefault&itemid=NOED03%20Oct%202010%2013%3A35%3A43%3A470

[Kolesar]

1. The cost of completing Churchill's anti-Soviet nightmare

I always think about what we could have done with all those resources that were wasted on the giant nuclear bomber fleet and other useless weapons.

(seriously, ... always)

EDIT: What RW logic could lead someone to unrecommending a thread about our disasterous nuclear weapons program??

[ensho]

2. things nuclear suck up money big time

nt

[madokie]

3. There will be a nukie slide by here shortly telling you how that is not true

even going into a big spiel about how this bullshit or that bullshit proves their point.
Rec.

watch and see if I'm right on this :-) :hi:

[txlibdem]

5. You're soooo wrong

I'm both a "nukie" and a "solar-ie" "wind-ie" "geothermal-ie" "tidal power-ie" "wave power-ie" and whatever other zero-carbon, zero-fossil power proponent. I'm not sure that I fit your definition but I'll run with it anyway.

But I'm not going to go into a spiel (not even a tiny, tiny one) about bullsh*t, unless we're hijacking the thread to talk about gardening -- I'm all for BS in that case.

[GliderGuider]

7. I wish I could be a "zero-carbon, zero-fossil power proponent"

Since there is no such animal, I'm a "low-carbon, low-fossil, low-consumption" proponent instead.

And yes, that includes solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, tidal, and nuclear as and where appropriate, within the constraints of cost and local conditions. My only exception to the "as and where" caveat is for consumption reduction, which is always and everywhere appropriate, as far as I can tell.

Regarding nuclear, I have no particular safety concerns given modern engineering. However, I think the discussion is largely moot at this point due to negative public sentiment and cost.

[txlibdem]

10. Half measures

I don't see the point in proposing half-measures to the carbon/fossil fuel nightmare we are currently living. "Low carbon or Low Fossil" is a half measure, ensuring that we continue to spew deadly toxins into the atmosphere and continue to enable the security and economic perils of using fossil fuels. The time has long ago past for half measures.

Half-measure best case scenario, we reduce our death count by half, but the surviving half lives in misery anyway.

Full-measures WORST case scenario, we reduce the bad by 51% and thousands (or millions) who would have died will now live. And the quality of life for the survivors is a little bit better.

Full-measures best case scenario, we avert global catastrophe, humanity and our culture survives intact, thrives on its new energy sources and a new day dawns for Mankind. (cue the harp music)
:hi:

[GliderGuider]

12. Not half-measures, just a statement of the current reality.

It's impossible at the moment to build anything industrial with a zero-carbon footprint. Everything we do requires some amount of fossil fuel at this point. It would be nice to aim for for a zero-carbon solution, but virtually all our industrial infrastructure would need to be replaced to do that. It might happen, but I'm not betting on (or promoting) any particular outcome.

I'm not that concerned about things "surviving intact". They never have before, things always change into something else. I like the idea of making rational, conscious, wise choices about every action as we go along. The Buddha had one thing right - clinging to memories of the past or expectations for the future, and wanting the present to be different than it is, is a sure road to suffering.

Let the river flow.

[txlibdem]

15. Veering off-topic with "carbon footprint"

We were discussing energy sources and emissions not how much coal or natural gas it takes to smelt the metal for a wind turbine. If we veer off topic onto that and also limit ourselves to 2010 technology and techniques then you are absolutely right. But if we stick to the topic of what energy sources we power our nation with and how much CO2 or other green house gas emissions they give off then there is a definite advantage in "shooting for the moon."

The technologies we will use in 2050 probably haven't been invented yet and they certainly bear little resemblance to what we use today. The heat from a nuclear reactor can be used to do all kinds of stuff, from smelting metal to chemical processing on the high temp side, also for heating buildings or keeping ice off of bridges or streets via embedded hot water tubing once the power generating process has sapped or dissipated most of the heat..

Concentrating sunlight with a hand-held magnifying glass produces heat high enough to start fires so it isn't too far out of the realm of possibility that a larger setup could take the place of fossil fuels in many of our industrial processes, perhaps all of them.

[GliderGuider]

16. I guess I don't self-identify as an engineer very much any more.

Some of the themes of my life these days are:

The majority of our problems are caused by solutions.
The concept of "progress" is one of the most pernicious illusions that our culture has fostered.
The idea that the world consists of resources intended for human use is even more pernicious, especially if we use those "resources" to achieve "progress".
I'd rather we didn't try quite so hard, even with the best of intentions.
I'd rather be surprised by the future than try to plan it into a box.

[madokie]

9. So what exactly is your point?

[txlibdem]

11. You made a statement, I refuted it.

[madokie]

14. okie dokie

Have a good afternoon then :hi:

[GliderGuider]

4. Plutonium is nasty stuff.

Still, a 6% escalation in the estimate over 4 years (from 870M to 927M pounds) seems on the face of it to indicate a pretty solid original estimate. The word "soar" hardly seems appropriate here.

Another interesting thing: that billion pounds appears to be about half the average 1.8 billion pound cost of decommissioning the other plants. I wonder why decommissioning Sellafield A is going to be so cheap?

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. The cost of the other plants includes research facilities and a reprocessing plant

so you shouldn't just divide it by 20 to get an average figure.

[GliderGuider]

8. Good point. But it still seems to me that

The decommissioning costs have not "soared" nor do they appear particularly egregious. We do have to clean up, after all.

I've been involved in decommissioning, cleanup and remediation projects for small communication sites that just had some hydrocarbon soil contamination from corroded/leaking diesel fuel tanks, and even those were surprisingly expensive.

[txlibdem]

13. Darn good points.

We see that on the teeVee machine sometimes while watching home improvement shows. It costs a bundle to cleanup even a tiny fuel spill.

Speak to anyone who has purchased a gas station. You wouldn't believe the costs involved in turning it into anything else but another gas station. And if the exemptions for gas stations were removed the price of gas would have to be significantly increased.

With nuclear power plants, the costs of decommissioning and cleanup have to be included in their operation.

[Dead_Parrot]

17. Sounds pretty cheap

We can see Sizewell A produced over 110TWh of electricity, so that's still under 1 penny per KWh. Compared to the UK's Solar FITs of around 30p/KWh, it's a bargain.

[GliderGuider]

18. Only if you use that new-fangled invention

called arithmetic. If you stuck to emotion like we're supposed to do on this board, you'd realize how bad it really is...

[Dead_Parrot]

19. My bad. How's this?

[GliderGuider]

20. Ah, the pills are working!

[NNadir]

21. We might add that our anti-nuke friends couldn't clean up the mess from their gas friends for 500

TRILLION dollars.

How come nobody asks Amory Lovins, BP consultant, how he's going to restore the Gulf of Mexico to "greenfields" status.

How come we never hear from the dangerous fossil fuel apologists in the anti-nuke industry about how much they're going to pay to put the planetary atmosphere the way it was before they shat upon it?

They've been dumping dangerous fossil fuel waste into the atmosphere for over a century without any responsibility to clean it up.

Predictably, the same fuckers who couldn't care less about restoring earth's atmosphere to the same standard they apply to nuclear stuff, are here with their innumerate horseshit, but they like horseshit. It's um, how they plan to run their cars, not that they actually know how to run cars on horseshit, but, press 'em and they'll talk about it forever.

[DrGregory]

22. Apples and Oranges

Taxpayers will pick up most of the bill because the twin reactor plant, as well as 20 other reactors around the country, are state-owned - some by the Ministry of Defence for the production of weapons-grade plutonium.
--------------------------------------------------

The clean up problems for a nuclear weapons production reactor / facility
are VERY DIFFERENT from a commercial power facility.

In the USA, cleaning up Hanford is VERY DIFFERENT from dismantling
Shippingport - the USA's first nuclear power plant.

Another "apples and oranges" comparison; to what purpose????

Dr. Greg

[Nihil]

23. The usual ...

> Another "apples and oranges" comparison; to what purpose????

Usual reason: To bad-mouth anything that can possibly be tied to the word "nuclear".

[muriel_volestrangler]

24. However, Sizewell A isn't one of the MoD plants

In the UK, the Magnox reactors were designed for the dual use of generating commercial electricity as well as being able to produce plutonium for the country's defence programme. A report released by the UK's Ministry of Defence (MoD) says that both the Calder Hall and the Chapelcross power stations, which started up in 1956 and 1958 respectively, were operated on this basis3. The government confirmed in April 1995 that production of plutonium for defence purposes had ceased at these two stations, which& are both now permanently shutdown. The other UK Magnox reactors were civil stations subject to full international safeguards.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf15.html

Sizewell A was built for, and run by the Central Electricity Generating Board: http://www.magnoxsouthsites.com/about-us/our-sites/sizewell-a/site-history

So, no, not apples and oranges. This was a plant built purely to provide power. As GliderGuider pointed out in #4, its decommissioning costs are less than a twentieth of the total, which may be accounted for by the facilities used to produce plutonium being more expensive (and there are research facilities and a reprocessing plant included in the £37 billion figure).

The figure given for the plant is relevant, and the best estimate at this time.