£250 Million for Nuclear (Financial) Failure in UK
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Nuclear power is expensive, and the costs always seem to go up. And not just because of environmental catastrophes. The latest nuclear news out of the UK backs this statement up yet again.
“The taxpayer will have to stump up almost £250m more to bail out the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority in the next financial year after falling asset sales and rising expenditure cut its income by 17.5%,” The Guardian notes.
“The shortfall is revealed in the NDA’s just-published draft business plan for 2012-15, which shows the impact of being unable to offload land to the private sector for new nuclear plants and the end of the contracts to supply Japan with mixed-oxide fuel.”
Terry Macalister of The Guardian and Doug Parr, Greenpeace’s chief scientific officer, are apt to point out the same thing I mention above:
“The setback will give more ammunition to environmentalists and other critics who argue that the wider nuclear industry is infamous for cost overruns and calls on public funds,” Macalister said.
“For all the claims of the government that it will be the power giants like EDF that will foot the cost of the next generation of nuclear, the reality yet again is that the hard-pressed taxpayer will end up footing the bill,” noted Parr.
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