5 ms·

"The estimated cost of running and cleaning up the site have soared. Sellafield is so expensive to maintain that it is considered a fiscal risk by budgetary off

"The estimated cost of running and cleaning up the site have soared. Sellafield is so expensive to maintain that it is considered a fiscal risk by budgetary officials. The latest estimate for cleaning up the Britain’s nuclear sites is £263bn, of which Sellafield is by far the biggest proportion. However, adjustments to its treatments in accounts can move the dial by more than £100bn, more than the UK’s entire annual deficit. The cost of decommissioning the site is a growing liability that does not count towards the calculation of the UK’s net debt." Frightening on many dimensions

mschuster91 3y ago
The most astonishing part about it is just how many pro-nuclear people here or on Twitter and Reddit ignore the fiscal risks associated with nuclear - not just the obvious aspects of worst-case liabilities or long-term secure storage, but also stuff like this.
- digging 3y ago
  I don't think that's fair. Anti-nuclear comments also widely ignore the fiscal risks and focus on the obvious issues. Most people probably don't know about the financial issues.
  - cycomanic 3y ago
    I think that's not entirely true. Much of the discussion about nuclear has shifted away from the usual talking points and shifted towards costs. The primary argument against nuclear made here on HN is cost.
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      > The primary argument against nuclear made here on HN is cost. Because it's the easiest one to make, and most importantly, the easiest one to prove. Talking about cancer rates and whatnot, there's many a way to debate oneself to death about which study has greater trustability... but no way around the numbers: dealing with the waste is expensive, acquiring the fuel is expensive (and incredibly damaging to the environment), constructing NPPs is expensive and a multi-decade project, operating them is expensive, insuring them is expensive (or one runs the Soviet Russia model and has the government/tax payer as the insurance of last resort), keeping them and the fuel secure is expensive (which is an issue with the much-hyped small reactors - a prime target for any terrorist looking for some material for a dirty bomb), and taking them apart is expensive. Nuclear power is only so "cheap" because of the extremely long life of a NPP and because a lot of the mentioned expensive parts has been externalized or not properly accounted for at all.
  - hgomersall 3y ago
    The "financial" issues in this context is just a placeholder for "shit loads of resources". As always with spending at the state level, the billions needed are just representative of the opportunity cost.
- Gare 3y ago
  Isn't Sellafield mostly a consequence of rushing to acquire the atomic and hydrogen bomb as quickly as possible? Akin to Hanaford site in the USA.
  - brightsize 3y ago
    *Hanford.
  - NikkiA 3y ago
    Not really, no. The Butex process ran at sellafield from 1951 to 1964, only the period of 1951 to 1958 was producing material for the UK nuclear weapons program, after the successful hydrogen bomb tests the UK signed an agreement to a) use US nuclear warheads in UK bombs/missiles, and b) provide the US with plutonium from sellfield in return. The Purex process, which ran from 1964 til last year at the Magnox plant, and til 2018 at the THORP plant for AGR reprocessing, was the reprocessing process that replaced it, and only ever provided nuclear material to the US*, the UK never used it domestically. * I'm not 100% sure on this, since several EU nations used Sellafield/THORP to process their waste, I would imagine France at least wanted their plutonium for their own nuclear weapons back, but I don't know to what extent France used sellafield vs their own reprocessing facility in Marcoule
- snakeyjake 3y ago
  The extreme cost of Sellafield is due to waste and accidents from the UK's nuclear weapons program, not its commercial power generation program. The vast, overwhelming, majority of waste was created by processing nuclear fuel into plutonium (and other radioactive elements) for bombs. The UK was under enormous pressure in the 50s and 60s to keep up with both the US and USSR so they cut tons of corners to have a domestic bomb. The article "for some reason" conflates the two: the waste from their nuclear weapons research and development and (extremely minimal) environmental impact of commercial power generation.
  - trebligdivad 3y ago
    I think to be fair some of it was also due to stuff done in the early days of figuring commercial power out; but that was a long time ago. Sellafield has taught a lot of people what's needed to do it properly.
    - u320 3y ago
      Even that was using technology which haven't seen much use outside the UK. They were never truly commercial, supporting the nuclear weapons program was a requirement from day 1 and was the reason for some design choices that was suboptimal for power generation.
  - whatshisface 3y ago
    Why did the UK want to keep up with the US?
    - saulrh 3y ago
      Because if you try to depend on the US's nuclear umbrella you end up like Ukraine.
      - avar 3y ago
        No, the UK was in NATO, and if it didn't develop its own nuclear weapons in could have easily convinced the Americans to give them nukes for deterrence purposes, as the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy etc. did. The real reason is that the UK (and France) wanted and still want a seat an the big boy's table. I.e. the UN security council etc.
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  Maybe we know the full story. Sad to see this sort of alarmist “journalism” from a publication that aligns with green energy.
gorgoiler 3y ago
I can never wrap my head around why costs like this are so high. If you consider most industrial processes involve digging stuff out of the ground and turning it into something else, and that work is done by people using machines built by other people also made of stuff dug out the ground then the cost must surely be bounded by bits of land you have to dig up and people you have to pay to do stuff. It’s not like cleaning up Sellafield requires a 100 high stack of Da Vinci paintings or anything else artificially rare like that. So with £60k salaries all round costing the employer £120k in total and a 25 year work schedule — that’s £3m per worker. Does that mean 90k people are involved? Maybe the only part of this that’s so crazy is the 25 year project timeline? By contrast the British Armed Forces must be employing about the same number of people over about the same amount of time?
- saulrh 3y ago
  I imagine that a lot of that cost is project and timeline risk mitigation - what happens if people NIMBY you repeatedly and demand ever more insane mitigation protocols and you end up having to move to Antarctica to build a space program for launching the top ten meters of the entire British Isles into Sagittarius A*.
  - gizajob 3y ago
    Could also build a giant granite pyramid over the entire site. Should keep the Cumbrians in wages for a couple of hundred years.
    - u320 3y ago
      It wouldn't surprise me if that actually increased the amount of radioactivity released.
- seren 3y ago
  I remember an example from another nuclear site cleanup. If you work on a part potentially contaminated you cannot used a normal vacuum cleaner that will disperse some contaminated dust, so you need a special purpose device. Then you cannot dispose easily of the dust, so you need another process. Since the device is also critical you probably need some regular maintenance or tests, so you need someone to manage them. So basically every single step is much more complex with the associated cost.
ChuckMcM 3y ago
When I read stuff like that I am a bit irritated because it doesn't inform the reader that there are much less expensive ways to "clean up" these facilities. The problem with those cheaper ways is that they lock up the nuclear isotopes in a way that prevents them from being reprocessed into new fuel or recycled into weapons again. Back in 1985 there was an interesting demonstration of vitrification[1] which I felt was pretty cool. And if you seal this glass inside a steel case (which keeps all the alpha/beta decay products inside) you're basically left with slightly warm stackable steel things that emit zero radiation. But they can't be (easily) post processed back into concentrated nuclear materials. [1] https://physicsworld.com/a/a-glassy-solution-to-nuclear-waste/ https://physicsworld.com/a/a-glassy-solution-to-nuclear-wast...
- jcrawfordor 3y ago
  I'm not sure what you're referring to, it's not typical to preserve isotopes during cleanup activities. The cleanup process mostly involves packaging contaminated items to bury them. This process is dangerous and must be done with extensive protective equipment, which makes it very slow and time consuming. The isotopes involved here aren't useful anyway. We're talking about everything from gloves to concrete walls that have been contaminated with daughter products. What I think you're referring to is processing of spent fuel, which is a smaller item in these types of projects since the spent fuel is already packaged for storage. I'm not an expert on the UK situation but I wouldn't be surprised if spent fuel management is a tiny portion or not included in that estimate at all, it's usually already covered out of operating budgets.
stevesimmons 3y ago
The cost of fossil fuels is equally frightening if you cost cleaning up its emissions in the same way. Nuclear only looks so bad because we ignore the externalities of the alternatives we currently price based on just extraction cost.
- Klinky 3y ago
  Nuclear & fossil fuels both look bad when considering long-term sequestration of their waste. That said many of these sites are so polluted due to fast & loose early nuclear weapons programs.
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    Sellafield’s toxicity comes from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel into plutonium for nuclear weapons. Using that as evidence that commercial nuclear energy waste is expensive or complex to handle seems disingenuous. Also the costs given are total over the span of 100 years. That’s quite a pittance from the perspective of annual government cash flow. You don’t need to sequester things long term for nuclear. First, waste has lots of uses and isn’t just discarded (eg medical applications). Secondly, we will build breeder reactors which can reuse spent fuel decreasing radioactivity further. Also, the most radioactive waste decays very quickly and the remainder isn’t as toxic. Most of the complexity of water management is that people hear “radioactive waste” and instantly enter NIMBY fear mode instead of figuring out how to manage the risks. But sure, if we strangle nuclear then we’ll never improve our ability to solve and mitigate problems associated with energy production.
    - Klinky 3y ago
      You clearly did not read the second sentence in my tiny comment. Hand wavy nuclear apologia is what's actually incredibly disingenuous. You don't just need to keep tabs on it for 100 years. Much longer & ideally in a coordinated fashion. If there's such demand for nuclear waste, why aren't companies making bank off of it? The demand isn't as high as you think. We'll build magical breeder reactors that aren't actually commercially viable & use reprocessing facilities with the same process drawbacks that created some of these messes in the first place? Sounds like a bad idea. Poo pooing the fears and dangers of nuclear is how we got into this mess where nuclear has a bad rap, deservedly so, from very poor management of very powerful substances. The realities are that nuclear is incredibly complex & costly to implement & manage in a way where its full potential is realized. That's not a reason we shouldn't do it, but let's stop pretending commercial nuclear is viable.

mschuster91 3y ago

The most astonishing part about it is just how many pro-nuclear people here or on Twitter and Reddit ignore the fiscal risks associated with nuclear - not just the obvious aspects of worst-case liabilities or long-term secure storage, but also stuff like this.

digging 3y ago
I don't think that's fair. Anti-nuclear comments also widely ignore the fiscal risks and focus on the obvious issues. Most people probably don't know about the financial issues.
- cycomanic 3y ago
  I think that's not entirely true. Much of the discussion about nuclear has shifted away from the usual talking points and shifted towards costs. The primary argument against nuclear made here on HN is cost.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > The primary argument against nuclear made here on HN is cost. Because it's the easiest one to make, and most importantly, the easiest one to prove. Talking about cancer rates and whatnot, there's many a way to debate oneself to death about which study has greater trustability... but no way around the numbers: dealing with the waste is expensive, acquiring the fuel is expensive (and incredibly damaging to the environment), constructing NPPs is expensive and a multi-decade project, operating them is expensive, insuring them is expensive (or one runs the Soviet Russia model and has the government/tax payer as the insurance of last resort), keeping them and the fuel secure is expensive (which is an issue with the much-hyped small reactors - a prime target for any terrorist looking for some material for a dirty bomb), and taking them apart is expensive. Nuclear power is only so "cheap" because of the extremely long life of a NPP and because a lot of the mentioned expensive parts has been externalized or not properly accounted for at all.
- hgomersall 3y ago
  The "financial" issues in this context is just a placeholder for "shit loads of resources". As always with spending at the state level, the billions needed are just representative of the opportunity cost.
Gare 3y ago
Isn't Sellafield mostly a consequence of rushing to acquire the atomic and hydrogen bomb as quickly as possible? Akin to Hanaford site in the USA.
- brightsize 3y ago
  *Hanford.
- NikkiA 3y ago
  Not really, no. The Butex process ran at sellafield from 1951 to 1964, only the period of 1951 to 1958 was producing material for the UK nuclear weapons program, after the successful hydrogen bomb tests the UK signed an agreement to a) use US nuclear warheads in UK bombs/missiles, and b) provide the US with plutonium from sellfield in return. The Purex process, which ran from 1964 til last year at the Magnox plant, and til 2018 at the THORP plant for AGR reprocessing, was the reprocessing process that replaced it, and only ever provided nuclear material to the US*, the UK never used it domestically. * I'm not 100% sure on this, since several EU nations used Sellafield/THORP to process their waste, I would imagine France at least wanted their plutonium for their own nuclear weapons back, but I don't know to what extent France used sellafield vs their own reprocessing facility in Marcoule
snakeyjake 3y ago
The extreme cost of Sellafield is due to waste and accidents from the UK's nuclear weapons program, not its commercial power generation program. The vast, overwhelming, majority of waste was created by processing nuclear fuel into plutonium (and other radioactive elements) for bombs. The UK was under enormous pressure in the 50s and 60s to keep up with both the US and USSR so they cut tons of corners to have a domestic bomb. The article "for some reason" conflates the two: the waste from their nuclear weapons research and development and (extremely minimal) environmental impact of commercial power generation.
- trebligdivad 3y ago
  I think to be fair some of it was also due to stuff done in the early days of figuring commercial power out; but that was a long time ago. Sellafield has taught a lot of people what's needed to do it properly.
  - u320 3y ago
    Even that was using technology which haven't seen much use outside the UK. They were never truly commercial, supporting the nuclear weapons program was a requirement from day 1 and was the reason for some design choices that was suboptimal for power generation.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  Why did the UK want to keep up with the US?
  - saulrh 3y ago
    Because if you try to depend on the US's nuclear umbrella you end up like Ukraine.
    - avar 3y ago
      No, the UK was in NATO, and if it didn't develop its own nuclear weapons in could have easily convinced the Americans to give them nukes for deterrence purposes, as the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy etc. did. The real reason is that the UK (and France) wanted and still want a seat an the big boy's table. I.e. the UN security council etc.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
Maybe we know the full story. Sad to see this sort of alarmist “journalism” from a publication that aligns with green energy.

gorgoiler 3y ago

I can never wrap my head around why costs like this are so high. If you consider most industrial processes involve digging stuff out of the ground and turning it into something else, and that work is done by people using machines built by other people also made of stuff dug out the ground then the cost must surely be bounded by bits of land you have to dig up and people you have to pay to do stuff. It’s not like cleaning up Sellafield requires a 100 high stack of Da Vinci paintings or anything else artificially rare like that. So with £60k salaries all round costing the employer £120k in total and a 25 year work schedule — that’s £3m per worker. Does that mean 90k people are involved? Maybe the only part of this that’s so crazy is the 25 year project timeline? By contrast the British Armed Forces must be employing about the same number of people over about the same amount of time?

saulrh 3y ago
I imagine that a lot of that cost is project and timeline risk mitigation - what happens if people NIMBY you repeatedly and demand ever more insane mitigation protocols and you end up having to move to Antarctica to build a space program for launching the top ten meters of the entire British Isles into Sagittarius A*.
- gizajob 3y ago
  Could also build a giant granite pyramid over the entire site. Should keep the Cumbrians in wages for a couple of hundred years.
  - u320 3y ago
    It wouldn't surprise me if that actually increased the amount of radioactivity released.
seren 3y ago
I remember an example from another nuclear site cleanup. If you work on a part potentially contaminated you cannot used a normal vacuum cleaner that will disperse some contaminated dust, so you need a special purpose device. Then you cannot dispose easily of the dust, so you need another process. Since the device is also critical you probably need some regular maintenance or tests, so you need someone to manage them. So basically every single step is much more complex with the associated cost.

ChuckMcM 3y ago

When I read stuff like that I am a bit irritated because it doesn't inform the reader that there are much less expensive ways to "clean up" these facilities. The problem with those cheaper ways is that they lock up the nuclear isotopes in a way that prevents them from being reprocessed into new fuel or recycled into weapons again. Back in 1985 there was an interesting demonstration of vitrification[1] which I felt was pretty cool. And if you seal this glass inside a steel case (which keeps all the alpha/beta decay products inside) you're basically left with slightly warm stackable steel things that emit zero radiation. But they can't be (easily) post processed back into concentrated nuclear materials. [1] https://physicsworld.com/a/a-glassy-solution-to-nuclear-waste/ https://physicsworld.com/a/a-glassy-solution-to-nuclear-wast...

jcrawfordor 3y ago
I'm not sure what you're referring to, it's not typical to preserve isotopes during cleanup activities. The cleanup process mostly involves packaging contaminated items to bury them. This process is dangerous and must be done with extensive protective equipment, which makes it very slow and time consuming. The isotopes involved here aren't useful anyway. We're talking about everything from gloves to concrete walls that have been contaminated with daughter products. What I think you're referring to is processing of spent fuel, which is a smaller item in these types of projects since the spent fuel is already packaged for storage. I'm not an expert on the UK situation but I wouldn't be surprised if spent fuel management is a tiny portion or not included in that estimate at all, it's usually already covered out of operating budgets.

stevesimmons 3y ago

The cost of fossil fuels is equally frightening if you cost cleaning up its emissions in the same way. Nuclear only looks so bad because we ignore the externalities of the alternatives we currently price based on just extraction cost.

Klinky 3y ago
Nuclear & fossil fuels both look bad when considering long-term sequestration of their waste. That said many of these sites are so polluted due to fast & loose early nuclear weapons programs.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  Sellafield’s toxicity comes from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel into plutonium for nuclear weapons. Using that as evidence that commercial nuclear energy waste is expensive or complex to handle seems disingenuous. Also the costs given are total over the span of 100 years. That’s quite a pittance from the perspective of annual government cash flow. You don’t need to sequester things long term for nuclear. First, waste has lots of uses and isn’t just discarded (eg medical applications). Secondly, we will build breeder reactors which can reuse spent fuel decreasing radioactivity further. Also, the most radioactive waste decays very quickly and the remainder isn’t as toxic. Most of the complexity of water management is that people hear “radioactive waste” and instantly enter NIMBY fear mode instead of figuring out how to manage the risks. But sure, if we strangle nuclear then we’ll never improve our ability to solve and mitigate problems associated with energy production.
  - Klinky 3y ago
    You clearly did not read the second sentence in my tiny comment. Hand wavy nuclear apologia is what's actually incredibly disingenuous. You don't just need to keep tabs on it for 100 years. Much longer & ideally in a coordinated fashion. If there's such demand for nuclear waste, why aren't companies making bank off of it? The demand isn't as high as you think. We'll build magical breeder reactors that aren't actually commercially viable & use reprocessing facilities with the same process drawbacks that created some of these messes in the first place? Sounds like a bad idea. Poo pooing the fears and dangers of nuclear is how we got into this mess where nuclear has a bad rap, deservedly so, from very poor management of very powerful substances. The realities are that nuclear is incredibly complex & costly to implement & manage in a way where its full potential is realized. That's not a reason we shouldn't do it, but let's stop pretending commercial nuclear is viable.