Link to the study - European Parliament - Europa

Nuclear Decommissioning: Management of Costs and Risks
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Background
During the process of accession to the European Union, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Slovakia committed
to shut down several older reactors. As an act of solidarity the EU and a number of donor countries
committed their assistance to cover parts of the necessary decommissioning costs, for which
previously none or only insufficient funds had been collected and were not available when needed.
In 2011, several years after the shutdown of the reactors, during which predominantly the EU had
provided considerable support, the European Court of Auditors assessed the effectiveness of the
financed activities and identified several serious deficiencies.
Following the report, the Budgetary Control Committee of the European Parliament, which examines
implementation of the EU budget, decided to assign Öko-Institute with an independent assessment
of the decommissioning process. The tasks of the assessment were to identify best practices in
decommissioning nuclear reactors in Europe, to compare these with the practices in the three (former
accession) countries and to derive recommendations from this comparison.
Aim
The investigation to identify best practices in Europe was structured as follows:
1. An Europe-wide inventory identified 88 reactors in a shutdown and decommissioning state. They
cover a large variety of reactor types, ages, operating years and power outputs.
2. Three countries - France, Germany and the UK – dominate the overall decommissioning projects
by number, types and operational age, so that the identification of best practices is focused on
these three countries.
3. From these countries, the examples of EDF in France, Sellafield Ltd. in the UK and EWN in
Germany were selected for a more detailed analysis, because these were promising to yield
representative state-of-the-art approaches for identification of best practices.
The investigation of the three selected examples concentrated on the following questions:
How is the organisation that manages the decommissioning constituted?
How closely and effectively is the control over the organisation that manages the decommissioning
designed and applied?
How is project and risk management practiced in the managing organisation?
How, and with which experiences, are the regulatory bodies approached by the managing
organizations?
How, and with which results, are cost estimates for decommissioning performed?
How is the decommissioning knowledge and experience of the existing workforce at the sites
used and which measures are taken to transfer as much experience as possible to the
decommissioning phase?
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