Nuclear power a costly failure

Background:

During a recent 4-day conference in Toronto on "Waste Management,
Decommissioning, and Environmental Restoration of Canada's Nuclear
Activities" (sponsored by the Canadian Nuclear Society) Adrian Simper,
Strategy & Technology Director of the UK's Nuclear Decommissioning
Authority, revealed that the total cost of nuclear waste management and
decommissioning of historical nuclear facilities would be about $80 billion.

He also made it clear how difficult the clean-up of these contaminated
sites would be from a purely technical point of view.

Gordon Edwards.
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Chris Huhne: Nuclear power a costly failure

By Steve Connor, Science Editor, The Independent, Friday, 14 October 2011

http://tinyurl.com/5wr2579

Britain is still paying for nuclear-generated electricity consumed a generation ago

because of the hidden costs of an industry reared on the expectation of public

subsidies, the Energy Secretary Chris Huhne said yesterday.

He told the Royal Society in London that the nuclear industry and the Government

should show that they have learned from their past mistakes if they are to retain

public support for a renaissance in nuclear power. "And some of those mistakes

are not small," he said in a keynote address. "Nuclear policy is a runner to be the

most expensive failure of post-war British policy-making, and I am aware that this

is a crowded and highly contested field."

Half of the budget of the Department for Energy and Climate Change goes on
cleaning up Britain's legacy of nuclear waste, which includes the world's largest
stockpile of civil plutonium waste, three Olympic-sized swimming pools of high-level
waste, enough intermediate waste to fill a supertanker and even more low-level
waste, he said.

"That is £2 bn a year, year in and year out, that we are continuing
to pay for electricity that was consumed in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s on a false
prospectus," he told the Society. "The nuclear industry was like an expense-account
dinner: everybody ordering the most expensive items on the menu because
someone else was paying the bill."

Despite £49bn in nuclear liabilities, Mr Huhne said that it was important to press

ahead with a new fleet of nuclear power stations to meet the challenge of climate

change.