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Power The Almighty Buck

Sellafield Cleanup Cost Rises To $175 Billion Amid Tensions With Treasury (theguardian.com) 73

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

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  • 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.

      • Re:It had a good run (Score:5, Interesting)

        by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Friday November 01, 2024 @04:53AM (#64911293)
        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 Disarmament (CND) was established. It had wide popular support: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
  • by HotNeedleOfInquiry ( 598897 ) on Friday November 01, 2024 @12:00AM (#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.

  • I bet the Brit's could use some sweet EU funds for the cleanup. But they chose to pay the bill fully, for them self instead.
  • The UK has built a total of 19 civilian reactors. This means the cleanup cost of this one site, not entirely civilian I'm aware, adds about 7 billion GBP to the sticker cost of these reactors. That's more than the reactors cost. If we properly accounted for cleanup, none of these would have been built in the first place.

    • Yeah. Im a fan of nuclear. We cant abandon it entirely. There are niche applications where nuclear power will make sense, and the nuclear weapons arent disappearing anytime soon either. But civilian nuclear power turned out to be eye-bleedingly expensive after you factor in the cleanup costs. Not the right use for the technology. Too bad, but thats the way the numbers turned out.
    • If we properly accounted for cleanup, none of these would have been built in the first place.

      Untrue. You aren't accounting for the thirst in the late 1940s and 1950s for weapons-grade nuclear material for building bombs. That material is made in reactors.

      The electricity being produced was the secondary objective. Bombs were the primary. And nobody - literally nobody - gave a shit about the waste in that era. "Dump it into tanks in the ground and we'll deal with it later" was the most complete strategy anyone came up with for 50 years.

  • How does one calculate an ROI on a waste cleanup? It is either needed or not needed, and if it is needed the required monies must be spent whether or not it is generating a "return" for the taxpayer however that might be defined.

    (the idea that government expenditures are supposed to generate a measurable positive "return" is one of the most pernicious of the last 70 years)

  • Britain is part of Europe? Sonofa...

/earth: file system full.

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