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Power The Almighty Buck

Sellafield Cleanup Cost Rises To $175 Billion Amid Tensions With Treasury (theguardian.com) 35

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The cost of cleaning up Sellafield is expected to spiral to 136 billion pounds ($175 billion USD) 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 2.7 billion pounds a year -- that it is causing tension with the Treasury, the report from the National Audit Office (NAO) suggests. Officials from finance ministry told the NAO it was "not always clear" how Sellafield made decisions, the report reveals. Criticisms of its costs and processes come as the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, prepares to plug a hole of about 40 billion pounds in her maiden budget. Gareth Davies, the head of the NAO, said: "Despite progress achieved since the NAO last reported, I cannot conclude Sellafield is achieving value for money yet, as large projects are being delivered later than planned and at higher cost, alongside slower progress in reducing multiple risks."

He added: "Continued underperformance will mean the cost of decommissioning will increase considerably, and 'intolerable risks' will persist for longer."

David Peattie, the NDA's chief executive, said: "Sellafield is one of the most complex environmental programs in the world. We're proud of our workforce and achievements being made, including the unprecedented retrieval of legacy waste from all four highest hazard facilities. But as the NAO rightly points out there is still more to be done. This includes better demonstrating we are delivering value for money and the wider significant societal and economic benefits through jobs, the supply chain and community investments."

Sellafield Cleanup Cost Rises To $175 Billion Amid Tensions With Treasury

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  • Except for the parts you should ignore, the man behind the curtain is not a nuclear industry PR employee so don't bother looking.
    • by kiviQr ( 3443687 )
      Have you ever seen coal mine, or even coal town. Fossil energy is not clean - but most people think only about air pollution not the rest.
      • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday November 01, 2024 @12:57AM (#64910951)
        If we didn't have wind and solar as viable options both perfectly capable of providing base load power you might have a point.

        Hell even if we pretend all the studies showing that wind and solar can provide base load even in places with poor wind and sun conditions The fact of the matter is we have limited funds to spend on clean energy and wind and solar even in a worst case scenario are a much better investment of those limited funds.

        At a bare minimum we should max out the wind and solar we can roll out before we start looking into nuclear. At best Europe might use a few nuclear reactors that they had mothballed to make up for the lost energy resources from Russia while they get as much wind and solar online as they can.
        • Nuclear is a money pit like fossil fuels which seems to escape the nuclear lobby, the costs never stop. at least with nuclear its clean during operation
      • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Friday November 01, 2024 @02:27AM (#64911039)

        Have you ever seen coal mine, or even coal town.

        That is a dumb comparison since no one is proposing new coal plants as an alternative to nuclear power. The alternative is renewables + storage.

        But the Sellafield comparison is also dumb since much of the contamination is from building nuclear weapons and reactors designed to produce weapons-grade plutonium.

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          The only reason the Brits ever got into nuclear power is the Bomb. Maintaining their nuclear arsenal is also the only reason for the massively too expensive Hinkley Point power station. The ugly truth is that in order to maintain a nuclear arsenal, you need nuclear reactors. Hence the comparison ist apt. Also, some people (Macron) are honest about nuclear power being non-viable unless you add military applications. Most simply lie about that blatantly obvious aspect.

        • by Bongo ( 13261 )

          Sigh, well I find it quite depressing how hard it is to get even simple reliable answers about anything. So traditional nuclear is for weapons and hence very contaminating. What about the fabled new generations of nuclear? Do they have the same issue?

          • It's not the full story. The point is not that creating nuclear weapons is contaminating and creating power is not. It's that the process behind chasing the bomb was a shitshow that caused contamination the world over. The issue isn't what was built, it is how it was used.

          • What about the fabled new generations of nuclear? Do they have the same issue?

            New-generation nukes, including SMRs and MSRs, haven't been proven.

            Maybe they'll fix the problems. Maybe not.

            China is building an SMR.

            The NuScale SMR has been approved for construction in America, but construction hasn't started because of ... soaring costs.

            India and China are building thorium MSRs.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Sellafield isn't the only nuclear site in the UK that is costing a fortune to clean up. It was also used to produce power and many of the problems developed due to the behaviour of the commercial owners and operators, not the nuclear weapons.

          The UK has a bad history with nuclear power. In the 60s we picked the wrong technology and bought into the hype about it being extremely cheap. By the 80s it was being sold off for a nominal sum and with a promise that the taxpayer would foot the bill for cleaning it up

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Yep, compare the worst option with the second worst one. That will make for an _honest_ argument!

      • Nuclear energy was supposed to be the cheap, clean, safe alternative to coal. So much for that idea.
      • Have you ever seen coal mine

        I've seen whataboutism. I'm seeing it right now. It's still a logical fallacy.

        Fossil energy is not clean

        I'm also seeing a false dichotomy.

        I've said before and will say again, if you have to compare nuclear to coal to make it look good then it is in fact not good.

    • Re:Nuclear is clean (Score:5, Informative)

      by crackerjack155 ( 1328815 ) on Friday November 01, 2024 @12:32AM (#64910925)

      Basically every large scale industrial plant that started 70+ years ago is a massive superfund site nowadays. For lead, asbestos, mercury, and/or a dozen other things.

      Also, this plant made nuclear weapons, and those plants have historically been incredibly dirty because the government doesn't have to worry about things like a private company, especially in the late 1940s.

      If they were building large scale solar panel or wind turbine factories 50+ years ago, they would also be covered in toxic waste. Just like old battery plants, synthetic rubber plants, and basically any other large scale manufacturing.

      I worked somewhere that used methanol to clean things, and I guarantee you that if they could legally dump the waste out back, they would've.

      • How can they not find 4% of wasteful spending to cut from other parts of the UK budget?

        It may be more difficult now that deficit spending and borrowing cannot be done with near 0% government debt.

      • by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Friday November 01, 2024 @05:46AM (#64911277)
        ...& nowadays we have politicians complaining about "too much regulation & red tape" that's holding industries & innovation back & that we need smaller govt & for regulators to step aside & let them get on with creating the next Sellafield, site of the Windscale nuclear fire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        We have regulation & red tape for a reason. Industrialists may complain about how it reduces their profits & makes them have to work harder but they're f**king great for the rest of us who don't want to have to live with the pollution & disasters.
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Nuclear sites are a bit different though, because the nature of the waste is that you can't just don a hazmat suit or use a normal robot to clean it up. There is no chemical process to neutralize the waste or process it into something safe.

        Sellafield was used for generating electricity as well as for weapons. A lot of the problems developed during the period of commercial ownership and operation, due to a lack of proper maintenance and investment.

      • Indeed, but it is worth noting that nuclear plants do present a specific elevated risk and thus elevated cost for cleanup. Sellafield may be an extra special case, but that doesn't mean every other nuclear plant can be compared to an old battery plant.

        Most remediations came in at a fraction of the cost.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      It is also cheap! Or at least some pathological liars keep claiming so ...

  • Personally I thought it was a decent sitcom, but the courtroom finale was a little cliched.

    Wait, Sellafield? Sorry, I got nothing.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Also named "Windscale" when it very nearly depopulated a rather large area due to a reactor core on fire.

      • Yep. Just because it wasn't behind the Iron Curtain during the cold war, doesn't mean it wasn't severe: "The Windscale fire of 10 October 1957 was the worst nuclear accident in the United Kingdom's history, and one of the worst in the world, ranked in severity at level 5 out of 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale." See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        The disregard for sensible safety & blunders didn't end with the Windscale fire. It's one of the main reasons the Campaign for Nuclear Disarma
  • by HotNeedleOfInquiry ( 598897 ) on Friday November 01, 2024 @01:00AM (#64910959)
    The local economy depends on the cleanup money and the job will be milked for decades
  • Rachel Reeves, prepares to plug a hole of about 40 billion pounds in her maiden budget

    Of that £40 billion, ca. 13B was a budget hole from the previous government. The difference is because the new government has decided to increase spending. I.e. it's self inflicted. This article simply says that they haven't prioritised spending on Sellafield.

  • In the end, you dig up stuff from one place, and move it to the other place. You move your radiation stuff from here. You move it to there.

    When you move dirt, it costs $8 a yard.

    When you move dirt with radiating elements, its $250+ a yard.

    We all want to be good stewards. Nothing wrong with regulating radiation Making it cost so much that it gets in the way with quickly and economically fixing these things, is a problem.

    --
    It's about dribbling. -- Ronaldinho

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      And if it were that easy, things would be a lot cheaper. The nice thing the nuclear power/weapons industry (they are closely connected although people lie about it) does is make the stuff they dig up massively more dangerous and poisonous.

  • The lie does not get more obvious than here.

"Love your country but never trust its government." -- from a hand-painted road sign in central Pennsylvania

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