If the economics of building new nuclear plants are still less than appealing, will the economics of cleaning up after them be more attractive?
That’s what the British government hopes. The U.K. announced today it plans to sell up to 100% of the state-owned clean-up division of the Atomic Energy Authority, which manages nuclear waste and decommissions old nuclear plants.
That’s part of the British government’s fire sale of state assets to raise cash, and also a plan to make nuclear cleanup a viable business, something it hasn’t really been while inside the government stable.
The government said today that the planned privatization is “the culmination of a process to develop a commercially viable nuclear decommissioning business. UKAEA Limited has now reached a scale where it can operate and expand independently from Government.”
So much of the buzz in the nuclear industry revolves around the prospect of a global nuclear revival, from French hopes to cash in on India’s big nuclear build to Toshiba’s plans to snap up providers of nuclear fuel and become a one-stop nuclear shop.
But the privatization of Britain’s cleanup specialists offers a different play on the prospects of the nuclear industry. If nuclear power does get a second life in the U.K. and other European countries, then there will be even more need for companies specialized in handling nuclear waste and decomissioning aging reactors as nuclear fleets are modernized.
If the long-awaited nuclear revival stalls, though—and so far private utilities in both Britain and the U.S. are balking at the cost of building new nuclear plants—cleaning up could still be an attractive business.
In the U.K. alone, more than 20 reactors will come to the end of their useful life over the next fifteen years or so and will need to be painstakingly dismantled and their components stored away. The U.K. Nuclear Decommissioning Authority estimates Britain will have to spend at least $90 billion cleaning up the country’s nuclear legacy over the next 130 years.