Costs for decommissioning and disposal of the world’s nuclear programmes is estimated at $1 trillion in total from 2001 to 2050.
According to the recently released International Atomic Energy Authority annual report 2004, the UK is expected to spend $100 billion on clean up costs, the USA $400 billion and Russia and China $200 billion each. The UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has recently released its own figures which agree closely with that sum.
According to a report in The Business, US firms lead the field in nuclear cleanup with Bob Churchill, managing director of the Amec nuclear business, saying US companies have an advantage over UK players because thay have already been “operating under a contracting system for 10 years.”
The newspaper said that the period from 2006 to 2010 will be the busiest for decommissioning, even though 2036-2040 is when the bulk of the world’s nuclear power plants will be shutdown.
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