The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) of the United Kingdom has slightly re-estimated the cost for cleaning up historic nuclear sites, from £118bn to £117bn (€140bn) across the next 120 years.
The cost estimate is based on the expected costs of decommissioning, dismantling and demolishing the buildings, managing and disposing of all waste, and remediation of land, a process that will last more than a century. It covers the sites of 11 Magnox nuclear power plants commissioned between the 1950s and the 1970s and those of former nuclear research sites at Dounreay, Harwell and Winfrith. It also includes costs of operating more modern nuclear plants, such as reprocessing facilities at Sellafield, whose cost estimates remain uncertain.
Costs currently stand at around £3bn (€3.6bn) per year, which are financed by the government for 2/3 and by NDA's commercial activities for the remainder. Apart from Sellafield, whose clean-up is carried out by the NDA, other nuclear sites (second generation of nuclear power stations, the Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor (AGR) fleet) will be decommissioned by EDF Energy, which sets aside funds for the future decommissioning programme via the Nuclear Liability Fund.
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