home > news & events > 06 June 2010
Britain is facing a £4bn black hole in unavoidable nuclear decommissioning and waste costs, Chris Huhne, the energy and climate change secretary disclosed. The additional costs derive from slowly rising expenditure on nuclear decommissioning and falling income due to the closure of aging power plants. The decommissioning costs over the next four years revealed by officials to Huhne are so serious that he has already flagged the crisis up to the cabinet.
The revelation places an unexpected burden on his department’s £3bn annual budget ahead of difficult spending negotiations this summer. “As you can imagine, this is a fairly existential problem. The costs are such that my department is not so much the department of energy and climate change, as the department of nuclear legacy and bits of other things,” Huhne told the Guardian.
The comments come when all departments face a squeeze on spending as the government tries to reduce a budget deficit forecast to exceed 160 billion pounds this year.
Nuclear energy is one of the fault lines in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition which took office last month. The Liberal Democrats oppose any construction of new nuclear plants but have agreed that they will abstain in parliament on the issue rather than seek to block projects.
Huhne, a Lib Dem, said that in the current financial year the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority's budget is expected to be in balance, the Guardian reported. However, from 2011-12, the deficit rises to 850 million pounds, in 2012-13 the gap increases further to 950 million and then to 1.1 billion in the two subsequent years.
"I do not think it is possible for anyone responsibly to stand aside and say we are not going to deal with it," Huhne was quoted as saying. "We just have to, but what we are effectively paying for here is decades of cheap nuclear electricity for which we have suddenly got a massive post-dated bill."
Many of Britain's aging nuclear power plants are scheduled to shut over the next few years, with the Conservatives pushing private companies to build new ones as part of a low carbon power generation mix.
For the full Guardian article click here
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