UK taxpayers face extra £250m bill for nuclear waste clean-up

www.guardian.co.uk
25 Dec 2011

The taxpayer will have to stump up almost £250m more to bail out the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority in the next financial year after falling asset sales and rising expenditure cut its income by 17.5%. The shortfall is revealed in the NDA's just-published draft business plan for 2012-15, which shows the impact of being unable to offload land to the private sector for new nuclear plants and the end of the contracts to supply Japan with mixed-oxide fuel.

The setback will give more ammunition to environmentalists and other critics who argue that the wider nuclear industry is infamous for cost overruns and calls on public funds. NDA income for 2012-13 is shown dropping from £867m to £717m, while expenditure is expected to rise from £2.88bn to £2.96bn, leaving the government needing to increase its total grant to the organisation, which oversees the dismantling of the UK's atomic legacy.

A spokesman for the NDA said the figures should not surprise ministers. "We have been spelling out to government every step of the way and there is no question of any slowdown of our programme", he added. The figures for the current financial year were flattered by a £157m one-off sale of land near Wylfa, on Anglesey, but the NDA has also been affected by the Japanese decision to announce the end to its future nuclear programme following the Fukushima nuclear crisis. This in turn persuaded the NDA to shut down the Sellafield mixed-oxide reprocessing plant (SMP) in Cumbria, with the loss of contracts worth £78m a year.

The NDA declined to say how much the SMP plant had cost to run, citing commercial confidentiality, but ministers admitted its failure to work properly meant operating losses of £626m had been accumulated by 2009 and it was said to be costing £90m a year to operate. There is now talk of the plant, which cost an additional £500m to build and will cost at least £100m to dismantle, being used as a temporary store for fissile materials.

There will also be a loss of income next year from the Oldbury nuclear plant in south Gloucestershire, which is now scheduled for closure in February. Greenpeace said the latest cost overrun proved that the nuclear power industry's financial viability was fundamentally flawed. Doug Parr, chief scientific officer at Greenpeace, said: "For all the claims of the government that it will be the power giants like EDF Energy that will foot the cost of the next generation of nuclear, the reality yet again is that the hard-pressed taxpayer will end up footing the bill".