Decommissioning - facts and fallacies.

I wrote this after listening to The Nuclear Humanist (Thies Beckers') response to Robert Llewellyn's (Fully Charged) snipes against nuclear power. Thies is right but there's an outstanding question he should address to Robert Llewellyn, Mark Z. Jacobson and their ilk. Do you support early decommissioning of German nuclear power reactors?

UK situation.

In UK, all the DECC decommissioning costs (to UK government) are for weapons sites (including submarines) and shut Magnox reactors (which are now all shut). Costs of decommissioning other power reactors: PWR and AGR, is solely the responsibility of the owners. EDF own all remaining power reactors. EDF have a fund growing annually for this mandated by UK government. It's a kind of tax. ~ 5% of their revenue. This is how decommissioning is handled in all Western democracies I know of.

Magnox spent fuel is all being reprocessed to remove plutonium. UK has a PUREX plant called THORP to do this. This extracts plutonium from spent fuel. That plutonium is not quite weapons grade but could provide very useful fuel for fast reactors. Alternatively - if anti-nukes have their way this plutonium will have to be disposed of too so that is cannot be used to make even substandard nuclear weapons. Only Magnox reactors will bear this extra reprocessing cost because Magnox reactors were special. The design was dual purpose. The spent fuel can be used to make nuclear weapons. Magnox are also far more expensive to decommission than PWRs because decommissioning was not considered in advance of their design. A flaw never to be repeated by other power reactor designs.

Europe and Sweden

Sweden has no Magnox reactors. Their PWR reactor decommissioning will be entirely the responsibility of the owners (via the decommissioning fund). Provided they are not shut prematurely, their decommissioning fund will bear the cost. The same kind of fund as per UK EDF reactors.

In Germany, plants are being shut too soon. So German decommissioning funds are not yet big enough to bear the cost. I wonder what Llewellyn and Jacobson think of that? Was early German shutdown a good idea?