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Financing Arrangements for Waste and Decommissioning Costs

The Government’s policy is that operators of new nuclear power stations must have secure financing arrangements in place to meet the full costs of decommissioning new nuclear power stations and their full share of waste management and disposal costs.

Consultation on Funded Decommissioning Programme Guidance for New Nuclear Power Stations

• Consultation on funded decommissioning programme guidance for new nuclear power stations (970KB)
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We consulted between February and May 2008 on the content of draft guidance on how these waste and decommissioning financing provisions will work, to help operators in understanding their obligations under the Energy Act 2008.

As part of the consultation, we held two national half-day events – one in London (17th April 2008) and one in Manchester (1st May 2008). The slides that the presenters spoke to at the events are available below:

• Consultation on funded decommissioning programme guidance for new nuclear power stations: national event - Manchester, 1st May 2008 (270KB)

The Government Response to the Consultation on Funded Decommissioning Programme Guidance for New Nuclear Power Stations

• The Energy Bill 2008. The Government response to the consultation on funded decommissioning guidance for new nuclear power stations (227KB)
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The Government’s response to the consultation was published on 18 September 2008. The 43 formal written responses to the consultation are available on the Funded Decommissioning Programme: Consultations Response webpage.

Series of informal discussion papers

As outlined in the Government response to the Funded Decommissioning Programme guidance consultation, we are producing a series of three informal discussion papers during autumn/winter 2008/09. Each of these papers addresses specific issues relating to the cost estimates for waste management, disposal and decommissioning and establishing an indicative fixed unit price for the disposal of intermediate level waste and spent fuel from new nuclear power stations.

The two papers that we have published so far are available below:

• The Energy Bill 2008. Pre-consultation discussion paper No. 1: on a methodology to determine how the fixed costs of building a geological disposal facility should be apportioned to and shared between operators of new nuclear power stations (150KB)
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• The Energy Act 2008. Pre-consultation discussion paper no. 2: on a methodology for establishing an indicative fixed unit price for the disposal of intermediate level waste and spent fuel from new nuclear power stations (106KB)
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This is not a formal consultation. These papers are intended to provide stakeholders with further opportunities for comment and to test emerging proposals. There will be a formal public consultation on the issues covered by the three papers in spring 2009.

However, we would be keen to receive any comments you may have on the issues covered in the papers. Details of how to send comments are contained in section 1 of the papers.

The third and final paper in this series will be on “the DECC cost model, with updated estimates for the total cost of waste management, disposal and decommissioning”.