MANCHESTER, England — Stakeholders leading the cleanup at the Sellafield nuclear fuel reprocessing and decommissioning site in Cumbria, England, cannot tolerate decommissioning cost spikes, like the 25 percent increase experienced at the site in 2005, an executive for Sellafield partner EDF Energy said Wednesday.
“(The 2005 hike) is not something that we can tolerate with the funding decommissioning program. We need to have that accuracy as early as we possibly can,” Tony Free, EDF’s head of decommissioning and environmental planning, said here Wednesday at the 2016 Nuclear Decommissioning Conference Europe. “We have a vested interest, as you can understand, in estimating those costs as carefully and as accurately as possible. There’s a balance to be struck there. If you are over-pessimistic, and you put an awful lot of costs into that, the consumer ends up paying particularly unnecessarily. But if you don’t make those costs accurately enough, if you don’t take a sufficiently proven view of what those costs are going to be, you will be covering the costs.”
Free, whose company provides fuel services at the Sellafield site, appeared on a decommissioning cost management panel Wednesday with four other experts.
Sellafield, a 100-year, 55-building decommissioning project, has an overall cleanup cost estimate of £70 billion. In 2013, the U.K. parliamentary Public Accounts Committee called the £2.5 billion increase from £67.5 billion “astonishing,” describing progress of the project as poor and recommending the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority terminate the contract of private consortium Nuclear Management Partners. NDA has since taken ownership of Sellafield, which is regarded as the home of the U.K.’s nuclear industry.
Sellafield head of estimating John Millington’s presentation Tuesday described lifetime cost estimation at Sellafield as “a journey into uncharted territory,” while Amanda French, NDA head of portfolio assurance, said stakeholders now have a better understanding of what needs to be carried out, and increased confidence at Sellafield.
As Free described it, the cost estimates are most accurate when the scope of the project is broken down into significant detail. That scope can then be compared to other major decommissioning projects, like those in France, where there are 58 reactors and where EDF derives much of its business.
“We can draw on that expertise,” Free said. “We draw on the practical experience, providing that we can actually read across from the scope in France with the scope in the U.K.”
Too often, Free said, the scope is broken out with cost estimates without details of the factors and strategies that went into it.
“People following behind don’t understand how you reached those numbers, rendering it useless in the future,” Free said. “So one of the things we’ve tried to do with decommissioning waste management is make sure there’s a detailed thread running through all those cost estimates, all those and all the work that derives those cost estimates, so that when people come to look at it in the future, and the future won’t be too far off, they understand how you got to that point, and what makes up that estimate. Then you can make a judgement on what’s changed. So it’s actually the level of detail, and that underpinning information, that we find really useful, given the longevity to those plans.”
