There’s a very interesting (if biased towards the nuclear industry) film on the BBC’s website about the decommissioning programme at the UK’s Sellafield nuclear facility.
The work, as you’d expect, is complex and fraught with dangers. No timescales are given for how long the decommissioning will take. As is said in the film, the reactors ‘were built in a great hurry’ in the 40s and 50s to provide warheads for the UK’s nuclear weapons with little thought given to how they were going to be ‘taken apart’. We can assume the process will take quite some time.
So how will decommissioning the latest reactors compare? Take, for example, the state-of-the-art 3rd generation EPR reactor currently being built by Areva in Finland and France in such a disastrous fashion. According to research prepared for the UK’s department of business, ‘a 25 year timescale’ is what we can expect for decommissioning an EPR. The cost of doing so at today’s prices is estimated at £1.3 billion.
Looking at the schedule and budget overruns involved in building EPR reactors you wouldn’t bet on those decommissioning figures being anywhere near accurate. Look forward to another BBC film about the complexities and dangers of nuclear decommissioning sometime around 2050.
– from greenpeace. 24 Nov 2008