The United Kingdom expects to spend another £117 billion ($154 billion) on remediation of 17 of its oldest nuclear sites into the next century, according to the latest cost update issued Wednesday.
That is down by about £1 billion from 2015, representing progress in cleanup over the past year, said Laurence Meehan, spokesman for the U.K.’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which owns the facilities on behalf of the government.
The 17 facilities, which date from the 1940s to the 1970s, include early nuclear research sites, former nuclear-weapon materials production facilities, the nation’s earliest nuclear power producers, and nuclear fuel reprocessing and fuel fabrication structures. Cleanup of the 6-square-kilometer Sellafield site in Cumbria is by far the largest project, followed by the planned geologic disposal facility for nuclear waste, according to the 2016 Nuclear Provision.
Meehan could not say this week how much has been spent to date on decommissioning, dismantlement and demolition, management and disposal of waste, and land cleanup at the 17 sites. The “Nuclear Provision” released Wednesday also encompasses expenses for facilities that for now remain operational.
In a separate document, NDA highlighted a number of advances in its decommissioning operations over the budget year from April 2015 to March 2016, including removal of spent fuel from the Magnox nuclear power site at Oldbury and a 70 percent reduction in radiation levels at Sellafield’s Pile Fuel Storage Pond.
Decommissioning operations now cost about £3 billion per year, with roughly 66 percent funded by the government and the rest from NDA commercial operations such as spent nuclear fuel reprocessing and management.
The decommissioning project is due for completion in 2120, though NDA cited the high amount of difficulty in setting concrete cost estimates or detailed timelines for work over such an extended period.
Decommissioning of the U.K.’s second-generation nuclear power fleet would be paid for by private firm EDF Energy through a different funding mechanism.
