In 2013-14 every UK taxpayer spent £252.53 on looking after nuclear waste. Why make more?

We don't know what to do with nuclear waste, which is toxic for thousands of years and is extremely expensive to look after. In 2013-14 every UK taxpayer spent a staggering £252.53 on looking after this waste. Why make more?

How much is there? 

4.5 million cubic metres (4.9 million tonnes), enough to fill Wembley Stadium four times over. 1,100 cubic metres is very dangerous high level waste and 290,000 cubic metres is intermediate level waste. It's managed by a government body called the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA).

4% more will be produced in the future from the UK's continuing nuclear defence capability (waste estimated up to 2060) and its continuing nuclear-powered submarine programme (waste estimated up to 2100). [Source: NDA]

How much does it cost?

It costs £3.31 billion a year to manage the nuclear waste mountain, of which £2.09 billion comes from taxpayers. [Source: NDA]

The government funding comes from the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC). Its total annual budget last year (2014-15) was £3.4 billion, so two thirds of this is for looking after Britain's nuclear waste mountain.

So on this basis, every one of the 29.7 million taxpayers in the UK spends £114.48 a year on looking after nuclear waste.

But this figure is not the same every year. In 2013/14, 95.8% of the roughly £7.9 billion DECC budget (£7.5 billion) went towards cleaning up the UK's nuclear legacy

Above: pie chart of the DEL budget. Chart by Carbon Brief.

On this basis, every UK taxpayer spends £252.53 a year on looking after nuclear waste.

Whatever the average in the future will be, it will continue for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Perhaps as long into the future as the building of Stonehenge is in the past. And we have no idea why that was built, so will people in the future know what our relics are?

The above chart of DECC's budget during 2013/14 shows what government calls "annually managed expenditure" (AME). Most of this relates to nuclear decommissioning. Most went towards cleaning up the UK's nuclear legacy. Source: Cabinet Office and DECC annual report and accounts. Chart by Carbon Brief.

The costs are rising.

The estimated costs of cleaning up the Sellafield nuclear site rose an estimated £5 billion to £53 billion in February this year, according to a March statement from Public Accounts Committee chair Margaret Hodge. She says: "It has taken far too long for the Authority to deal with management incompetence at Sellafield".

A private consortium, Nuclear Management Partners (NMP), that had been running the clean-up at Sellafield was stripped of its contract in January for reasons of incompetence.

Until the recent cuts DECC's budget was just 1.2% of the total government budget. Since then it's been told by George Osborne to save a further £70 million. The nuclear waste amount can't be changed for safety reasons.

Since most of DECC's budget is for managing nuclear waste, shouldn't the department be renamed The Department for Nuclear Waste?

Where should the waste go?

It's now held in temporary storage ponds on the north west coast of England, in Sellafield. These ponds are deteriorating, and leaks occur. So for 50 years the government and the industry has been looking for a permanent storage place underground.

It has not found one, because nobody wants it beneath their feet, not even the good people of Sellafield themselves.

So, since April the government can override local councils and force nuclear waste dumps on a community, under a law that was rushed through in the final hours of the last parliament. This is like the recent announcement that would allow fracking anywhere that the onshore oil and gas industry wants, against local wishes, if the government says so.

Is this what you want?

None of the above gives me any reason to be confident about Britain building a new generation of nuclear power stations.

Renewable energy can give much better value for money and provide baseload power in the cases of hydroelectric and marine power, and renewable gas, while electricity storage solutions are fast-tracked for Research and Development to store intermittently generated electricity from wind and solar, without leaving a toxic and expensive legacy.

DECC must tell us the truth about nuclear waste

The Government must come clean now about what taxpayers will have to cough up for managing existing as well as future nuclear waste.

It's shocking but true: we are not, as I had always understood, investing in a fund to manage our current nuclear waste in the future.

We are paying lip service to it and dodging the question at the expense of future taxpayers.

Moreover, there is total confusion about what provisions are being put in place to manage any future waste from any new nuclear power stations.

Will the real DECC budget please stand up?

Last week, the Guardian published on its website figures which appeared to show that spending by the Department of Energy and Climate Change on nuclear waste management has risen by an astonishing 81%, as part of an overall budget increase from last year of over 146%.

In trying to find out whether this is true I have found out a truth worse than this, as well as an admission that any new nuclear operators are allegedly being asked to contribute to a fund not only to pay for management and disposal of the new nuclear waste which their plants will create, but also for that of existing nuclear waste!

According to the Guardian, in 2009/10 DECC's entire spend totalled £3.18bn, but in 2010/11 it is spending £8.06bn, an increase of 146.02% that is largely due to nuclear liabilities.

This spending, according to the Guardian, breaks down as follows (please scroll down - Blogger is formatting this table weirdly):

DECC spending: £ per topic and change from last year

Topic	Amount	% increase or decrease
Nuclear Decommissioning Authority	£6.9bn	+81.12%
Committee for Climate Change	£4.4m	+12.12%
Low carbon UK	£622.7m	-29.8%
International agreement on climate change	£5.4m	+22.42%
Promoting low carbon technologies in developing countries	£278.6m	+159.52%
Coal Authority	£0.7m	+87.02%
Professional support and infrastructure	£117.7m	-7.62%
Energy	£87.2m	+3.33%
Historic energy liabilities	£104.5m	-106.8%

We already knew that DECC is unique among Government departments because it has to spend almost half of its budget on dealing with existing nuclear waste.

But to see that this has risen to almost almost 86% of overall DECC spending seemed incredible.

Trying to check this figure led me on a very confusing path.

My first port of call was the Guardian itself, where its reporter Simon Rogers said that DECC's press office had told him that the increase in spending was due to increased cost of high level waste management at Sellafield.

I then had several lengthy phone conversations and email exchanges with DECC's press officers, to see whether this was true.

They themselves were clearly struggling to understand what their own departmental figures meant and had to seek clarification more than once.

Now that they have explained them, I am even more concerned that the UK's nuclear liabilities are being left for future taxpayers to pay for.

The increase in the amount allocated to the NDA in DECC's budget is in fact only a paper increase. It is not real.

A DECC spokesman said that the cash that actually went ‘out of the door’ to the NDA for its decommissioning work was £1.7bn.

This is in line with the NDA's business plan, which says that government funding in 2010/11 is £1.69bn, rising to £2.022bn in the following financial year and £2.249bn in 2012/13.

But the Government reviews every three or five years the cost of nuclear waste management over the next 100 years.

The spokesman says "obviously that figure goes down as we spend money each year".

Personally, I have never known it to go down.

In fact, as he says, "...it can also go up. That is what has just happened".

Yes, this is what we expect.

He says the estimate "has increased by £5bn [to £55bn], and Government budgeting rules mean that our expenditure tables also need to reflect that".

The real cost of dealing with existing waste

This £55bn figure is a mystery. I can't find a source for it anywhere.

I can find that the NDA's Nuclear Provision for 2010/2011 alone was just over £49 billion, and that The National Audit Office put the cost of dealing with the waste and decommissioning of the U.K.'s 19 reactors at £73bn in 2008.... a much higher figure.

What will be the real cost of dealing with existing waste? In truth, nobody really knows.

But assuming that £55bn is the figure DECC is using, the £5bn increase is just a 10% increase on the one it was using before.

Yet the Guardian says the spending has gone up 81%. What, I wanted to know, accounts for the other 71%?

Is it because the NDA has to build a new pond store at Sellafield (see last month's report by Dr. Mike Weightman, the chief nuclear inspector at the Office for Nuclear Regulation?

No.

Is it because of the inspection of our military nuclear waste which has just taken place?

No. Both of these are covered by the NDA's regular spending.

Creative accountancy

It is actually an accounting trick.

There is no money.

It is a note attached to the budget which means "we hereby observe that will have to pay out £xxx billion of cash at some point in the future".

This sounds like the kind of creative accountancy that has gotten public finances into the mess they are in right now.

To help us understand it, let's try to analogise the situation to household spending.

If I know I have to spend £100,000 to maintain my house over the next 100 years, I might choose to pay £1000 a year into an interest bearing account to accrue as future source of funding.

Is the nuclear liability money being spent this way, I asked DECC?

No.

The spokesman was very clear about this. He wrote: "You might then ask, is this extra £5bn we’ve noted money that is set aside and kept in a separate pot somewhere, (like a pension)?

"No," he answered himself. "Think of the reference to it in the accounts as a formal record of the fact that we’ve changed our estimate of the grand total of what we think will need to spent in future."

In fact the pension plan is a great analogy. If you or I don't put a regular amount in to our pension plan then we know there will be nothing there in the future when we need it.

But DECC is not actually putting money into a fund to manage our nuclear liability, it is just stating that the money needs to be there in the future.

Where will it come from?

Who knows?

Remember, this is a taxpayers' liability.

But I have discovered even more than this.

New nuclear waste

In a phone conversation with another press officer, he admitted that new nuclear operators like Horizon and EDF are being asked to contribute to a fund not only to pay for management and disposal of the new nuclear waste which their plants will create, but also for that of existing nuclear waste.

I double checked that this was what he meant.

I said, "Are you seriously saying that the Government is not putting aside cash to deal with our nuclear legacy but is asking nuclear operators to do so? What do they think of that?"

If I were a nuclear operator I would be outraged.

But the question was dodged. He was having a hard time explaining it in the first place, and merely reiterated the line that the Government is taking a responsible position.

DECC's line on new nuclear waste is "New nuclear operators will be required by law to put money aside from day one to pay for the eventual decommissioning costs and their full share of waste disposal."

The law is the Energy Act 2011, under provision for the nuclear operator’s Funded Decommissioning Programme (FDP).

The value of the FDP is calculated using a “Waste Transfer Price” of, currently, £1 billion per reactor, although this is being debated by the Nuclear Liabilities Financing Board.

But Greenpeace's economist Ian Jackson has calculated that due to the extra work needed to comply with post-Fukushima safety requirements, the estimate is out by £445 million.

If there are 10 reactors built, taxpayers will end up forking out £4.45 billion to make up the shortfall.

Furthermore, the maximum price cap on all other costs has also been underestimated, he says, and should be £11.2 billion higher.

The Nuclear Liabilities Financing Board is the quango looking at the FDP issue, setting this cap.

But who exactly is doing its work?

According to the minutes of the Board's meetings, which are held every two or three months, representatives of the consortia hoping to build new nuclear power stations, Horizon, and NNB Genco (the consortium of EDF Energy and Centrica), have regularly attended its meetings.

Not only that, they seem to be setting the agenda and terms.

The minutes for December 2010, January and April 2011 illustrate how the Board and the office for Nuclear Development are letting NNB Genco design and explain the Fund, its structure and its role.

Isn't this a case of the tail wagging the dog?

Why are the private companies which stand to benefit from obtaining the lowest cost imposition able not only to attend the meetings of those who are setting the terms for private sector liability, but actually design these terms?

Moreover, there is no mention in any of the minutes of any real detail, for the sake of transparency.

Crucially, there is also no mention of whether the operators are supposed to be liable for any decommissioning costs of existing waste, as the DECC press officer said.

The whole business is, at best completely unclear, and at worst downright irresponsible.

There are serious concerns here over the extent to which taxpayers in the future are going to have to pick up the tab for dealing with not just current but future nuclear waste.

DECC should come clean.

And no new plants should be built until we have an absolutely cast iron guarantee that taxpayers will never have to pay any more than they already do to manage this monstrous and effectively always deadly liability.

The shocking truths about nuclear waste

It's not just that nuclear power is scary. It's very expensive and we don't know what to do with the waste. This post substantiates this claim.

The cost of dealing with existing nuclear waste

I was completely shocked when I discovered that over 60% of the Department for Energy and Climate Change budget is spent on decommissioning existing nuclear sites.

It's almost unbelievable. They don't tell you in their budget of course. I had to dig it out, and here are the links.

The decommissioning of existing nuclear power stations is currently managed by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. Its 2010-11 budget is £2.8bn, of which £1.69 billion comes from the taxpayer via DECC. DECC's overall budget in this year is £2.9bn.

This leaves just £1.2 billion for DECC to do everything else. Just think about that for a moment. It's a cost that can't be cut because it would be too dangerous to do so. Therefore the only thing that could be done when DECC had to cut its budget in the Spending Review was to cut everything else.

The last estimate for the cost of dealing with the waste and decommissioning of the U.K.'s 19 reactors, by the National Audit Office in January 2008 was £73 billion over the next hundred years. This was 18% above initial estimates, and the costs of even near-term actions are still rising when they should have stabilised.

This factors out to a cost of £1000 for each and every household in the UK for 100 years. What could we do with that money? Payoff our mortgages? Save that public library or hospital?

And what happens after the hundred years is up?

The cost of dealing with the radioactive waste from new nuclear power stations

The government has argued that new nuclear build should not be subsidised by the taxpayer and that companies should come up with a plan to manage the waste they create. They are currently allocating £1 billion per reactor.

But if I divide 19 into the 73 billion figure above I get nearly £4bn, not £1bn.

Now we all know that costs always rise never fall. We know from experience this particularly applies to the nuclear industry (see Paul Brown and Greenpeace's excellent voodoo economics report). Who is going to pick up the bill when these private companies say they can't afford to deal with the waste?

Let's take an analogy: successive Tory and Labour governments told us that PFI schemes were quick way to get infrastructure built at low cost to the taxpayer. We are now finding out that in fact it is the taxpayer that is being required to pick up much higher bills than they would have done in the first place for a longer period of time from many PFI schemes.

In some contracts, council tax payers will be paying for things that have already ceased to be a service.

And there is the problem of finding out what legal entity is liable for these future costs. Many PFI schemes have been sold on so many times in just a few years it has in some cases become hard to find who is now responsible. And what happens when companies go into receivership?

Yet nuclear waste will be around for hundreds of years. How much more difficult will it be? Who exactly will the contracts be with? You can imagine very easily what is most likely to happen... Taxpayers will pick up the bill.

But we are talking as if there is a solution to nuclear waste already, and there isn't.

What should we do with existing nuclear waste?

CoRWM, the independent Committee on Radioactive Waste Management, said in 2006 nuclear waste should be kept forever in a specially built safe storage facility deep underground.

But while the government pointed to this as the solution to waste from any new plants, CoRWM said it only meant this solution to apply to waste from Britain's old military nuclear programme dating back to the 1950s, so called legacy waste (see below for the link).

The government has asked for communities to volunteer to have nuclear waste stored in its location in return for a sweetener and bribes. So far, only one has come forward, the already nuclear-industry dependent area around Copeland, Cumbria, for which the government has been made to set up a “community fund” in return for allowing the continued operation and expansion of a low-level waste repository, where lightly contaminated material such as clothing is stored.

Experiments and discussions are still ongoing to determine whether and how high-level nuclear waste could be stored underground. The Office of Government Commerce has this year reviewed the Government management of the Managing Radioactive Waste Safely (MRWS) geological disposal programme, but the report has not yet been published.

The truth is we don't yet know what to do with existing nuclear waste.

Should we trust the government and industry on dealing with nuclear waste?

The Nuclear Liabilities Financing Assurance Board (NLFAB), which is stuffed with industry insiders, has one page on the DECC website, where its membership, remit and minutes of its meetings are published. It has discussed having a separate web presence and meeting NGOs but the current status of this work is not clear, since its minutes are only publish every six months and are extremely opaque giving almost no information.

This lack of information extends to the main DECC nuclear waste website and the MRWS website, most of which hasn't been updated since 2009.

This kind of secrecy does not inspire any confidence at all.

Do the experts believe we should have nuclear newbuild?

CoRWM does not believe that there should be any new nuclear build, because we don't know what to do with the existing waste. It can't actually come out and say so publicly, because that will be overstepping its remit.

But if you read between the lines of this document you can see its members struggling with themselves over how to phrase their intention in a politically acceptable manner.

Page 2 says "CoRWM’s intention to provide advice on the maintenance of public confidence in the management of new build wastes could be construed as support for new build. Such an interpretation would not be correct".

Its position statement on existing nuclear waste disposal - that it can be buried underground provided that a suitable site is found - "might be seized upon as providing a green light for new build. That is far from the case."

I think these experts, who have spent 10 years looking into the problem, are making their position quite clear. There should be no new nuclear power stations because we don't know what to do with the waste.

The Health and Safety Executive is currently evaluating proposals for new nuclear power stations submitted by energy companies. No doubt these will be sent back to the drawing board following the Fukushima incident.

The timetable for nuclear newbuild

The government was hoping that new nuclear build could start around 2014. The average length of time to construct a new nuclear power station is eight years. This means they won't be up and running until at least 2022.

Yet new wind farms take three years to build. Most renewable energy takes far less than 8 years.

Why are we wasting money and time on nuclear power when the money could be going into renewable energy, which is a lot safer and leaves no lasting toxic legacy?

There are many arguing that renewable energy is not up to the job. It's intermittent and unpredictable. But these criticisms only apply to wind power and photovoltaics.

There are many other technologies which I am describing in other blog posts, which, while not necessarily being market ready, certainly are just as market ready as carbon capture and storage, which is unproven at a commercial scale, and which the government is certainly relying upon to maintain business as usual while tackling climate change.

If the amount of investment that will be invested in new nuclear build was invested instead in taking these technologies forward, there is no doubt in my mind that Britain could be a world leader in, to pick just a few examples:

• geothermal
• marine power
• anaerobic digestion with CHP
• almost zero energy buildings
• nano-scale thermoelectric, thermionic or thermovoltaic devices
• photosynthesis-based dye solar cells
• solar cooling.

All renewable energy is solar power. It has been around for much longer than nuclear power. In 1878, the first solar parabolic dish was used to make ice. But even now this solar thermal market ready technology is largely unknown yet it has huge potential.

The 21st-century should be the solar age. Why waste money on nuclear?

Who's going to pay for new nuclear waste disposal?

The government has published a new consultation on the decommissioning of new nuclear power stations and what to do about all the new radioactive waste they'll create.

It specifies guidelines and principles for developers of new nuclear power stations in how to set up a Funded Decommissioning Programme. It underlines the principle that developers alone, not taxpayers, should pay for the decommissioning of plants and the storage and disposal of waste, which is covered under a separate consultation.

But the question is, will the cap on developers' costs be set high enough to avoid taxpayers one day footing some of the bill?

What does it cost now?

Existing nuclear waste is currently managed by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. Its 2010-11 budget is £2.8bn, of which £1.69 billion comes from the taxpayer via DECC. DECC's overall budget in this year is £2.9bn.

This means that the cost of managing existing radioactive waste is a staggering 58% of the Department's total expenditure. Because of its nature, this expenditure cannot, of course, be cut.

What will it cost in the future?

To avoid future waste adding to this bill, the Government says that a fund should be set up by developers to pay for new costs, and the consultations explain how the funds should be managed and what they should be used for.

The cost for each new power station is estimated to be about £1 billion. The question is, whether this estimate is sufficient, given the history of escalating costs in this area.

A parallel Waste Transfer Pricing Methodology explains how the cost of disposal will be determined, since the hypothetical (currently) Geological Disposal Facility has yet to be constructed. Rough costs for such a facility were estimated by the NDA a year ago, at around £20 billion, at current prices, but are dependent on the geology of the site.

The government expects that a cap will be set on the waste transfer price, but at a very high level - three times current cost estimates. But it's impossible to be certain that costs will not exceed this figure, so there will be an additional "risk free" to compensate the taxpayer for accepting this risk.

Companies interested in building new nuclear power stations have been lobbying the government furiously in an attempt to keep the cap amount down. But if the cap is set at the wrong level, the taxpayer will end up footing the extra bill.

The first plant is expected to be built by EDF and Centrica by 2018. However, on Tuesday, Alistair Philips-Davies, energy supply director at Scottish and Southern Energy, said he was now unsure whether this schedule could be maintained. "Often these things are a little bit more expensive than you think and come in a little bit later than you think," he told a committee of MPs, raising some wry smiles.

The current position held by the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM), which advises the government on this matter, is that "a range of issues, including social, political and ethical issues, arising from a deliberate decision to create additional wastes should be considered as an integral part of the new build public assessment process."

These issues are not covered in the consultation, however.

There is also a new consultation on the Strategy for the Management of Solid Low Level Radioactive Waste from the Non-Nuclear Industry in the United Kingdom. This includes waste from hospitals, the pharmaceutical sector, research and education establishments.

French nuclear cock-ups: not coming soon to a reactor near you

The collapse of the EdF takeover of British Energy is the right decision for the wrong reasons.

The private shareholders in British Energy, Invesco and M&G Investments who own 22%, greedily holding out for a higher share price, have shocked the pro-nuclear, pro-business BERR with their decision to reject EdF's £12 billion offer. The French state-owned EdF wasn't too pleased either. That sort of thing wouldn't happen in France.

The government sold all but 35% of its stake in British Energy last year. They probably rue the day now because they would love to have the £4bn in the Treasury coffers and the nuclear newbuild to go ahead. Conservative MP Peter Luff said the collapse was not necessarily a bad thing - if it had gone through, EdF would have "owned over a quarter of all electricity generation in the UK and the competition effect would've been very serious." I quite agree.

Business Secretary John Hutton has put a brave face on it: "We thought it was a good deal and were ready to accept." Like a pathetic salesman he tried to tout the land still available for anybody who wants to build a new nuclear power station: "Our commitment to nuclear power is clear.... BE still has potential sites and sites are available from the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority."

Meanwhile, British Energy is not exactly performing well. It announced in July that its Heysham and Hartlepool reactors, currently off-line due to faults, will now cost at least twice as much to repair - over £100m. Its chairman confessed that "output from our nuclear stations last year was disappointing." No kidding. And they say windfarms don't deliver.

French nuclear headaches to be exported to Britain

For those who think that new nuclear power is not a solution to either high energy prices, energy security or climate change, the EdF/BE news was positive, especially in view of the scandal rocking the French nuclear industry at the moment.

On July 7, Areva accidentally poured at least 18 cubic meters of liquid containing at least 75 kilograms of uranium onto the ground and into the river at the Tricastin nuclear site, prompting local authorities to launch an official enquiry and local people to be banned from drinking their own water. Environment Minister Jean-Louis Borloo has ordered an overhaul of France's nuclear supervision as well as groundwater checks around all nuclear plants.

President Sarkozy is keen to export French nuclear know-how around the world. Since his election, he has signed cooperation agreements on civilian nuclear energy with Algeria, America, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates, among others.

France has 59 reactors supplying 80% of its electricity. The Tricastin site is a major part of the French nuclear industry, with over 5,000 employees and many sub-contracting companies. It includes the military research facility of Pierrelatte, the EDF power plant, a factory for converting natural uranium (Comurhex), and a uranium enrichment factory (Eurodiff). The latter two are subsidiaries of Areva, which wants to build new nuclear power stations in Britain.

In June a consortium led by Areva won a 17 year contract to clean up Sellafield, worth at least £50m a year. Malcolm Wicks said in a parliamentary answer just before the summer recess that the contract specified no limit on the risk to the taxpayer in the event of an accident like that at Tricastin.

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) has given Areva indemnity if there were to be an incident, provided that it is insured against the first £140m of the damage costs.

NDA slammed for management failure as clean-up costs rise

We could have funded two London Olympics just from the rises in the estimated costs of cleaning up our nuclear waste over the past two years. The estimate is now around £73bn, according to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA).

An audit of the NDA, published also in July, says there are "inherent risks" in the way the body operates, pointing out that half of its income is dependent on unreliable sources such as fuel reprocessing at Sellafield's Thorp plant (closed since a leak was discovered in 2005). It also highlights management and accounting failures; simple things like not taking notes at minutes has led to budgetary confusion.

The audit is by the government's Select Committee on Business and Enterprise. The NDA is funded by Government funding and from commercial income. The commercial slice is "volatile and over time will decline as sites progressively close and move into the decommissioning phase," says the report. "The grant-in-aid portion of the NDA's income already represents a very sizeable proportion of BERR's annual budget - 42% of the original total Departmental Expenditure Limit (DEL) for the 2007-08 financial year."

The nuclear dilemma

It is said that your position on nuclear power comes down in part to your response to this dilemma: which is worse, the local damage caused by nuclear leaks and processed fuel lying around for 4.5 billion years (which Is the half life of depleted uranium), or the global catastrophes caused by runaway climate change?

However Britain doesn’t need to build major new power stations to keep the lights on and maintain security, according to a report just released by independent consultants Pöyry.

It says that if the UK government can meet its EU renewable energy targets and its own action plan to reduce demand through energy efficiency, then major new power stations (either coal, nuclear or gas) would not be needed to meet the country's electricity requirements up to at least 2020.