NTW Member
Honorary Senior Research Associate, Energy Institute, UCL
Founder, ncg
Faisabilité Technique et Financière du Démantèlement des Infrastructures Nucléaires
The issue of decommissioning costs is a key challenge in the nucear sector. Perhaps surprisingly, a recently published French Governmental report on Faisabilité technique et financière du démantèlement des infrastructures nucléaires, from Le Commission du Développement Durable et de l’Aménagement du Territoire, Assemblée Nationale, has just blown a significant hole in the French decommissioning strategy.
http://www2.assemblee-nationale.fr/documents/notice/14/rap-info/i4428/%28index%29/depots
In late January this year, on the last day of the Commissions work, the Committee took evidence from the EDF head of decommissioning and me. Given the Commission had been working on this for months, and had listened to mounds of complex data, I decided to cut to the chase and make as clear an argument as I could. What follows is that evidence.
How much has France, Germany and UK set aside for decommissioning ?
Whereas Germany has set aside €38 billion to decommission 17 nuclear reactors, and the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) estimates that clean-up of UK’s 17 nuclear sites will cost between €109 – €250 billion over the next 120 years – France has set aside only €23 billion for the decommissioning of its 58 reactors. To put this in context, according to the European Commission, France estimates it will cost €300 million per gigawatt (GW) of generating capacity to decommission a nuclear reactor – far below Germany’s assumption at €1.4 billion per GW and the UK of €2.7 billion per GW.
How can EDF decommission at such low cost?
EDF maintain that because of standardisation of some of the reactors and because there are multiple reactors located on single sites, they can decommissioning at a low cost. Does this claim stack up ? Well, probably not. Reactors are complex pieces of kit, and each has a differing operational and safety history. In other words, nuclear reactor decommissioning is essentially a
‘bespoke’ process.
Why has EDF underestimated the costs of decommissioning
and waste storage ?
Even EDFs €23 billion limited provision for decommissioning and waste storage is a large sum of money for a company that has huge borrowings and enormous debt, which is currently running at €37 billion, Standard and Poor and Moodys (the two biggest international credit rating agencies) have already downgraded EDFs credit-worthiness over the corporations potentially ill-advised decision to go ahead with attempting to construct two more of the failing Areva reactor design (the EPR) at Hinkley Point, UK. And any significant change in the cost of decommissioning would have an immediate and disastrous impact on EDFs credit rating – something that the debt-ridden corporation can simply not afford.
Spent nuclear fuel build-up
Then there’s EDF’s existential problems at France’s high-level waste storage and reprocessing facility at La Hague, where spent nuclear fuel stores are reaching current cooling capacity limits. This means La Hague may now have to turn away spent fuel shipments from Frances reactor fleet. In any case, since ASN have identified safety problems with some spent fuel transport flasks, spent fuel transport to La Hague has substantially slowed. All this means the build-up of spent fuel at nuclear sites across France, with the associated problem of cooling the spent fuel at nuclear sites during dry summer periods, with all that means for further escalation of rad-waste management costs.
French National Assembly Commission Findings
Happily, and perhaps unexpectedly, when the Commission publishes it’s final key findings, they come down on the side of those who voiced concerns about EDFs provisioning for reactor decommissioning and waste management does not include “obvious under-provisioning” regarding “certain heavy expenses”, such as taxes and insurance, remediation of contaminated soil, the reprocessing of used fuel and the social impact of decommissioning. The Commission found that the clean-up of French reactors will take longer, be more challenging and cost much more than EDF anticipates.
The Commission reports that EDF showed “excessive optimism” in the decommissioning of its nuclear power plants. “Other countries have embarked on the dismantling of their power plants, and the feedback we have generally contradicts EDF’s optimism about both the financial and technical aspects of decommissioning… “The cost of decommissioning is likely to be greater than the provisions”, the technical feasibility is “not fully assured” and the dismantling work will take “presumably more time than expected”.
Critically, the Commissions report says that EDF arrived at its cost estimate by extrapolating to all sites the estimated costs for decommissioning a generic plant comprising four 900 MWe reactors, such as Dampierre, noting that: “The initial assumption according to which the dismantling of the whole fleet will be homogeneous is questioned by some specialists who argue that each reactor has a particular history with different incidents that have occurred during its history”.
So what now?
Soon EDF will have to start the biggest, most complex and costliest nuclear decommissioning and radioactive waste management programme on earth. It seems very likely that (for various reasons not unassociated with it’s current bank balance) EDF may have seriously underestimated the real challenges and costs, with serious consequences for its already unhealthy balance sheet. This will have profound consequences for the French State, who underwrite EDF.
Taken up in the Press: