RWMAC's Advice to Ministers on the Radioactive Waste Implications of Reprocessing

9. COST IMPLICATIONS

During the course of its study, RWMAC investigated what could be said about the material management costs of each of the scenarios considered. To do this effectively would have required estimation of the total time-base resource costs, both capital and operating, of each of the options. This in turn would have enabled these costs, both undiscounted and discounted, to have been suitably compared.

A number of problems were identified in respect of this possibility. First, BNFL stated that it would not supply operating costs for reprocessing at THORP and B205, on the grounds of commercial confidentiality. RWMAC had to respect this, although sees a confidentiality logic to be less strong in the case of Magnox operations. Secondly, for other material management facilities, BNFL would only supply generic costs that were specified for one capacity or throughput. Having assessed the information provided, RWMAC concluded that the absence of reprocessing costs ruled out effective total costing and that scaling of the generic cost information to scenarios other than those for which they were derived would be hampered by important uncertainties (e.g. economies of scale, special considerations etc).

RWMAC then tried the approach of estimating the differential time-phased costs of each scenario. However, the differential approach was unsuccessful, because it became clear that one basic question dominated everything else – the difference between the operating costs of reprocessing as compared to interim storage of spent fuel.

Costing of the future management of radioactive materials and waste will be complicated by the need for projection into the medium-and-long-term future. It is also unclear what policy and regulatory standards, as well as other natural environment constraints, will apply. For instance, the cost of a disposal facility will depend on the monitoring and retrievability, and also closing-off requirements, that are sought. The costs of a store will depend on the lifetime and passivity (see section 6.1) requirements that are applied. The cost of building disposal facilities will also depend on the total inventory of the waste that it is proposed to put in them and what this implies for the size of the repository and hence the identification of a suitable location.

There is a limited amount of information on reprocessing costs in the literature. For example, a 1994 NEA/OECD study³³ concluded that the difference between the reprocessing and non-reprocessing options was negligible in the context of overall generating costs. However, a 1999 study by Sadnicki et al, partly funded and published by Friends of the Earth³⁴, questioned the NEA/OECD methodology.

Any evaluation, will also be heavily influenced by views of potential for recycling of reprocessed uranium and separated plutonium and, hence, the value that should be placed on these materials. As previous sections of this report have made clear, this issue is currently the subject of debate (see section 2.2) and differences of view.

In practice also, decisions on whether or not to reprocess are likely to be taken on the basis of the commercial perspectives of individual organisations, such as BNFL. The May 2000 House of Commons Trade and Industry Select Committee report⁶ noted, for instance, that "BE (British Energy) has made it clear that it would prefer storage-only arrangements for its fuel. It has no plans to use MOX fuel made from the plutonium produced by reprocessing. Storage is substantially cheaper for BE, by a factor of 3, based on the costs BE is charged by BNFL for storage as against reprocessing". However, in the time available, RWMAC was unable to investigate precisely on what costing and timescale basis the BE comments were made.

For all the above reasons, RWMAC decided that it was unable to undertake the reliable costing analysis as part of the current study.

The Trade and Industry Select Committee recommended⁶ that BNFL should "address in its Corporate Plan the prospects of reprocessing over the next four years to the end of the baseload contract period in 2004, and identify the commercial implications of any shift in policy from reprocessing to storage". RWMAC supports this recommendation. Further, in view of the importance of the subject and the widely different views in the public domain, it is recommended that an appropriate version of the findings be published for public information purposes. RWMAC believes that given the current controversy surrounding reprocessing, the case for its continuation does need to be fully and openly set out.