Nuclear waste costs continue to rise

Nuclear decommissioning costs have risen by a third in five years and could be set to increase further, MPs have warned.

And there was no certainty that the clear-up costs associated with the recently announced new generation of power stations would be carried by their private owners, a report from the Commons public accounts committee claimed on Thursday.

The latest estimates, made in 2007 by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), put the cost of decommissioning the UK’s 19 public sector nuclear sites at £73bn – a 30 per cent increase on estimates from 2003.

MPs accepted that the authority was facing the difficulties of a 50-year legacy of deferred decision making, had faced uncertainty about how much it could earn from the ageing facilities that were still open, and unexpected problems at Sellafield.

But the committee also identified areas were cost escalations could have been avoided, such as short-term changes to the decommissioning programme.

Committee chairman Edward Leigh described the £73bn bill as an "enormous" amount of money.

"We cannot be confident, however, that even this figure will not be significantly upped when the estimates are next revised," he said.

But a spokesman for the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (DBERR) said the government, the first to attempt to estimate the cost, had "always acknowledged that the cost estimate would increase in the short-term as the NDA gained greater understanding of what it is dealing with".

New nuclear stations

The committee said there were important lessons to be learnt from the experience so far.

"When new nuclear facilities are built, plans for decommissioning them should be already in place," Leigh said.

The government, when it announced plans for new nuclear power stations in January, said that the investing energy companies would be responsible for he full cost of decommissioning new facilities and their full share of waste management costs.

However Leigh expressed some concerns about the true position of DBERR.

"The department is unable to provide complete assurance that the costs of decommissioning new nuclear power stations will not fall back on future taxpayers," he warned.

But DBERR's spokesman was adamant that the government had been clear about what would happen with the new power stations.

"Companies - not taxpayers - must meet the full costs of eventual decommissioning of new nuclear power stations and their full share of waste management and disposal costs," he said.

The Energy Bill, currently being drafted by the government, would provide "one of the most robust regulatory frameworks in the world to ensure that nuclear generators will meet these costs", he added.