Decommissioning Nuclear Plants Costing Far More Than Expected

Lasrick writes: "This article takes a look at cost estimates of nuclear power plant decommissioning from the 1980s, and how widely inaccurate they turned out to be. This is a pretty fascinating look at past articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that consistently downplayed the costs of decommissioning, for example: 'The Yankee Nuclear Power Station in Rowe, Massachusetts, took 15 years to decommission—or five times longer than was needed to build it. And decommissioning the plant—constructed early in the 1960s for $39 million—cost $608 million. The plant's spent fuel rods are still stored in a facility on-site, because there is no permanent disposal repository to put them in. To monitor them and make sure the material does not fall into the hands of terrorists or spill into the nearby river costs $8 million per year.'"

Comments

First....

[funwithBSD]

Kill all the lawyers.

Re:why don't we keep them and use them?

[confused one]

By the time they decommission a reactor it is usually 30 or 40 years old. By that point everything is worn out. You could save some hardware and infrastructure; but, you would be replacing most of the equipment, including all the expensive bits. You'd basically end up tearing it all out and rebuilding it new. Car analogy: I'm restoring a 40 year old truck. Engine had to be torn down to raw casting and rebuilt with all new parts (only I didn't have to deal with neutron damage or metal embrittlement) The truck chassis and body: Well, I'm tearing everything off the frame and I'm starting from there. It will all get disassembled, cleaned, repaired and painted, then go back through a complete re-assembly process using factory manuals. When I'm done, it'll be a 30-40% new 40 year old truck. If you count my time at typical shop labor rates, it could end up costing almost as much as just going down to the dealer and stroking a check for a brand new one. The new one would probably be safer...

Re:why don't we keep them and use them?

[hey!]

A lawyer can't make you do anything. I once had a business partner who froze like a deer in headlights whenever our lawyer opened his mouth. As I said to him, the lawyer's job is to advise you of the trouble you might get into; but there's always *something* to be concerned about; it's *your* job to make a decision and shoulder the consequences. Business people choose which risks to take, and lawyers help them figure out what those risks are, simple as that. If your plans go kaplooie, it's your fault; possibly for hiring the wrong lawyer, or possibly hiring the right lawyer but letting him run your business for you.

This "it's all the lawyer's fault" business is childish baloney. It's not lawyers that keep owners from continuing to use these old reactors, it's the fact that these reactors are old and obsolete. It's not lawyers that made decommissioning the plants more expensive than projected, it's that nobody had ever done such a thing when the costs were estimated, and everyone chose a best case scenario in their plans because they wanted to see the things built. That's a *business* mistake, and an engineering mistake, but unless the lawyer was telling them they'd be able to cart their waste off to the town dump it's not a *legal* mistake.