Abstract

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority is an executive non-departmental public body, sponsored by the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy. We were created through the Energy Act 2004 to ensure the safe and efficient clean-up of the UK’s nuclear legacy comprising 17 sites across England, Wales and Scotland, some dating back to the 1940s.

The bill for decommissioning the UK’s nuclear legacy is currently estimated to be between £90 billion and £220 billion. The range reflects the considerable uncertainty that might be expected for a programme that extends over many decades, and involves the clean-up of facilities that were neither designed nor operated with decommissioning in mind.

In addition to the challenge of estimating the cost of decommissioning, the NDA must also determine the value that decommissioning delivers in order to justify the cost. This is essential if the NDA is to deliver its duty under the Energy Act 2004 of acting in a manner that it considers is most beneficial to the public.

This lecture seeks to bring these challenges to life and describe some key policy decisions for the UK and other countries that exemplify the war between cost and value in nuclear decommissioning such as ‘how clean is clean enough?’