The True Cost of Nuclear Energy

Some think that nuclear energy is an important source of electricity and ought to be part of every nation’s energy generating system. Others think that nuclear energy is too dangerous to use and we should decommission nuclear power plants all over the world. I tend towards the latter view, but accept that there may be some merit in the former view. Whatever view you hold about nuclear energy everyone who thinks about it agrees that there must be a safe and perfect way of storing nuclear waste to prevent the waste being used for weapons and to prevent the waste leaking into the atmosphere or the sea or the land where it will cause harm and damage to human health and to the health of the ecosystem where the waste is stored.

There seems no safe way to dispose of waste except by storing it. I know of no plans to send the waste far into space or into the sun so when we create nuclear waste as a by-product of generating electricity through the use of uranium and similar fuels we are stuck with the waste on this planet until the waste uranium decays into lead, which process of transmutation takes, depending on the waste, somewhere between a thousand years or many hundreds of thousands of years. As the waste decays it becomes less radioactive but that process also takes thousands of years before all the waste generated becomes safe.

Stored nuclear waste is hot. It needs to be stored in places where it can be kept cool, because overheated nuclear waste is a hazard in itself.

None of what I have written is unknown; these are the risks that nuclear power plant operators have to manage and deal with as a condition of being permitted to generate electricity from uranium. You would have imagined that any government with permits nuclear power plants, having at the foremost of its mind the safety of its citizens and its duty to protect them, would be keen to not only make regulations about nuclear waste but to stringently enforce them. However, such a concept should remain firmly  in your imagination..

The National Audit Commission of the United Kingdom has been looking at nuclear waste at the Sellafield site, and its findings (published at  http://www.nao.org.uk/default.aspx) do not make happy reading.

It seems that for the past fifty years Sellafield’s operators have been treating nuclear waste rather more casually than the circumstances require. Much nuclear waste has been stored in run down buildings and the operator has failed to develop a long term plan for disposing of waste. Costs of decommissioning are spiralling out of control as the plant has now built up enough medium and high level nuclear waste to fill 27 Olympic sized swimming pools, not that anyone in their right mind would want to do this. Some of the buildings which hold nuclear waste have been allowed to deteriorate so that they now pose a risk to people and the environment.

The life time costs for cleaning up Sellafield are, according to the findings of the Audit Commission around £67 billion. (If this money was funded by the domestic electricity user over the next five years it would add around £300 a year to the electricity bill of each household.

In fact, nuclear power plant decommissioning is paid for not by the operators of the power station but by the taxpayer through the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which gets it money to reimburse the decommissioning costs from the Department of Energy and Climate Change. The operator that produces the electricity and resells it pays nothing towards decommissioning.

The National Audit Commission reports that so far the taxpayer has received poor value for money in the decommissioning expenditure. That does not surprise me; I get surprised when the taxpayer gets good value for money.

The National Audit Commission has made recommendations and I expect that they will eventually be implemented. Sellafield is the largest nuclear power station in the United Kingdom. I cannot find out precisely but I expect it generates about 10% of Britain’s electricity that comes from nuclear power plants. If that is so, multiply the £67 billion by ten to get a reasonable idea of the lifetime generating cost of nuclear energy in decommissioning and waste treatment terms.

The cost of decommissioning nuclear power stations and disposing of the waste that they create puts into proper context the very small amounts of money spent subsidising renewable energy. If renewable energy was subsidised by the public purse on the same scale as nuclear energy, we would all have renewable energy and no one would bother with nuclear energy, because clean renewable energy comes without risk. The figures for simply disposing of nuclear waste makes the Renewable Heat Incentive, coming shortly, look like a real bargain for the nation.

Nuclear energy is only possible because the taxpayer has to pick up these hidden and often ignore future costs, and much of these costs will have to be paid by people you are not yet born.

Filed under: climate change, energy, nuclear, nuclear energy, Renewable Heat Incentive, renewables Tagged: DECC, department of energy and climate change, environment, National Audit Office, Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, nuclear energy, nuclear power, nuclear power plant, nuclear power plants, nuclear waste, science, Sellafield, storing nuclear waste