Antinuclear

Britain’s multibillion black hole in nuclear waste costs

Chris Huhne warns of £4bn black hole in nuclear power budget, guardian.co.uk, Patrick Wintour, 1 June 2010 “………Britain is facing a £4bn black hole in unavoidable nuclear decommissioning and waste costs, Chris Huhne, the energy and climate change secretary disclosed tonight. The decommissioning costs over the next four years revealed by officials to Huhne are so serious that he has already flagged the crisis up to the cabinet.

The revelation places an unexpected burden on his department’s £3bn annual budget ahead of difficult spending negotiations this summer. “As you can imagine, this is a fairly existential problem. The costs are such that my department is not so much the department of energy and climate change, as the department of nuclear legacy and bits of other things,” Huhne told the Guardian.

The additional costs derive from slowly rising expenditure on nuclear decommissioning, and falling income due to the closure of ageing power plants, Huhne said.

The black hole is equivalent to wiping out one-sixth of the overall cuts in public spending identified by the Treasury with such fanfare last week.

But Huhne insisted: “I do not think it is possible for anyone responsibly to stand aside and say we are not going to deal with it. We just have to, but what we are effectively paying for here is decades of cheap nuclear electricity for which we have suddenly got a massive postdated bill.”

The revelation will also hand further ammunition to those who say a new generation of nuclear power stations in Britain will end up being more expensive than the industry claims……..Huhne said: “My predecessors avoided taking tough decisions when they should have done and the result is that it is much more expensive to deal with than if we had dealt with it in a timely manner back in the 70s and 80s. A lot of it is spent fuel, and was not dealt with at the time. It is a classic example of short-termism. I cannot think of a better example of a failure to take a decision in the short run costing the taxpayer a hell of a lot more in the long run.”

Chris Huhne warns of £4bn black hole in nuclear power budget | Politics | guardian.co.uk

June 3, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | uranium | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear costs, nuclear wastes, radioactive, uranium