Cost to decommission nuclear power plant subject of meeting - Seaside Courier: North County

City News Service

The latest price tag to decommission the shuttered San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station will be the focus of a community meeting scheduled for this evening in Oceanside.

The Community Engagement Panel, which was created to advise plant owners Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas & Electric and others, will take up an estimate that the two decades-long process could cost $4.4 billion. The new amount, up from previous estimates of around $3.3 billion, was reported earlier this month.

How much of the costs of the shutdown, along with replacement power and other needs, will be borne by the utilities and how much by ratepayers has been the subject of many months of talks between the companies, regulators and consumer watchdogs.

Thursday's meeting at Quantum Learning Network Conference Center at 1938 Avenida del Oro starting at 6 p.m. is open to the public.

The rising cost of decommissioning a nuclear power plant | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

ANALYSIS

04/28/2014 - 16:00

The rising cost of decommissioning a nuclear power plant

Dan Drollette Jr

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DAN DROLLETTE JR

Dan Drollette, Jr. is a science writer/editor and foreign correspondent who has filed stories from every continent except Antarctica. His stories have appeared in Scientific American,...

“The most reliable estimate of the cost of decommissioning [a nuclear power plant] is 10-15 percent of the construction cost, contrary to some highly inflated estimates ... Modern serious studies of the disposal problem indicate that satisfactory isolation is technologically feasible, even for the long term.” So wrote MIT nuclear engineering professor David Rose inthe November 1985 issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

How misguided that view seems now, with the advantage of decades of experience. The Yankee Nuclear Power Station in Rowe, Massachusetts, took 15 years to decommission—or five times longer than was needed to build it. And decommissioning the plant—constructed early in the 1960s for $39 million—cost $608 million. The plant’s spent fuel rods are still stored in a facility on-site, because there is no permanent disposal repository to put them in. To monitor them and make sure the material does not fall into the hands of terrorists or spill into the nearby river costs $8 million per year. That cost will continue for an unknown number of years. David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that even without the ongoing costs of monitoring and security, the average reactor now costs about $500 million to deactivate.

But Professor Rose should not be singled out for his overoptimism about nuclear plant decommissioning costs; the Bulletin’s archives reveal a fairly constant tendency to downplay those costs. In 1988, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission study said utilities should set aside just $100 to $130 million in decommissioning funds per plant, according to the Bulletin article, “Last rites for first commercial reactor.” That article highlighted the era’s bullish feeling toward end-stage nuclear power costs by describing the response to disposal of a decommissioned reactor vessel at the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington state: To celebrate the 1,000-ton vessel’s arrival via the Columbia River, residents of a nearby city unfurled a “Welcome to Richland” banner.