Who will pay for decommissioning and nuclear waste storage?
For new nuclear power stations the government plans to cap nuclear waste charges to the companies, yet the costs are almost certain to go up, and then who pays? The main problem is that despite over 50 years of nuclear power in the world there is still no safe storage solution for the enormous amount of nuclear waste that has already been produced. And some of this waste will be highly radioactive – and lethally toxic – for hundreds of thousands of years. Having even more new nuclear power stations will mean leaving an even greater legacy of this poisonous waste for future generations to deal with. Trying to predict a realistic cost for nuclear waste storage is extremely difficult. The government has so far ruled out reprocessing (separating out plutonium and uranium to process into new fuel) the spent fuel from new nuclear power stations. This means that the spent fuel may need to be stored for up to 160 years at each site. There are plans for an underground site, but these are still
