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

why don't we keep them and use them?

[valpo homeboy]

How about a study on the cost of upgrading? All that infrastructure, real estate, containment vessel, gen set, distribution hardware, cooling .... has to be worth something? How about reprocessing the fuel to reduce its volume and remove the plutonium? I agree with first poster, killing each and every lawyer peripherally involved with the project is the first step.

Re:First....

[penguinoid]

Also got to kill the stupid environmentalists (only the stupid kind that are opposed to nuclear because it contains the word "nuclear", to coal, oil and gas cause it contains carbon, to hydroelectric cause of sediments, to wind cause of birds, to solar cause of toxic elements during production, ...). Sadly, there aren't enough environmentalists who can look at the whole picture and realize that nuclear plants produce less radioactive waste than coal plants, skyscrapers kill more birds than wind power, etc., and that if they want to accomplish something they need to support a realistic objective.