Oh look, another nuclear plant with gigantic and extremely long-term costs.
And yet the government wants to build more of these?
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Sellafield cleanup cost rises to £136bn amid tensions with Treasury
Wed 23 Oct 2024 05.01 BST
The cost of cleaning up Sellafield is expected to spiral to £136bn and Europe’s biggest nuclear waste dump cannot show how it offers taxpayers value for money, the public spending watchdog has said.
Projects to fix buildings containing hazardous and radioactive material at the state-owned site on the Cumbrian coast are running years late and over budget. Sellafield’s spending is so vast – with costs of more than £2.7bn a year – that it is causing tension with the Treasury, the report from the National Audit Office (NAO) suggests.
[...]
Sellafield is forecast to cost £136bn to decommission, which is £21.4bn or 18.8% higher than was forecast in 2019. Its buildings are expected to be finally torn down by
2125 and its nuclear waste buried deep underground at an undecided English location.
The underground project’s completion date has been delayed from 2040 to the 2050s at the earliest, meaning Sellafield will need to build more stores and manage waste for longer. Each decade of delay costs Sellafield between £500m and £760m, the NAO said. Meanwhile, the government hopes to ramp up nuclear power generation, which will create more waste.
Sellafield is owned by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), a taxpayer-owned and -funded quango. The NDA believes the cost of decommissioning Sellafield could range from £116bn to
£253bn, depending on the length and complexity of the cleanup.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... dit-office
