A most expensive funeral – dealing with a dead nuclear reactor

The rising cost of decommissioning a nuclear power plant Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Dan Drollette Jr 30 April 14“……. 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. That cost will continue for an unknown number of years. David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that even without the ongoing costs of monitoring and security, the average reactor now costs about $500 million to deactivate……..

Of course, there is a reason that experts tended to emphasize the benefits and minimize the costs of nuclear power in the early decades of the Atomic Age—economic self-interest. This reality may have been acknowledged most eloquently in a May 1953Bulletin article, “How Shall We Establish a Nuclear Power Industry in the United States?” written by the director of research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Alvin Weinberg: “There is the perfectly natural impulse of self-preservation among the many technical and administrative people in nuclear development; we realize that our personal futures depend on how well we succeed in establishing a nuclear energy enterprise which fulfills a persisting economic need, and that there is not too much time left before success will have to be demonstrated or funds will be cut.”http://thebulletin.org/rising-cost-decommissioning-nuclear-power-plant7107

April 30, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized

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