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<p>Recent changes in the estimated costs of dealing with legacy radioactive waste
and decommissioning announced in the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority's Annual Report
and Accounts for 2013/14 are due in their entirety to the decommissioning programme
at Sellafield. These costs should not be used as a guide to costs of decommissioning
modern nuclear reactor sites. The vast majority of the liability at Sellafield is
a result of the Cold War military programme on that site, dating back to the 1940s,
and the very early days of the civil nuclear industry, dating back to the 1950s and
1960s. These historic facilities were built extremely rapidly to very different quality
and safety standards compared with nuclear plants constructed today and without plans
for how they would be ultimately decommissioned, These facilities present a unique
decommissioning challenge requiring a complex suite of engineering projects in order
to first gain access to their waste inventory before retrieving and then treating
this material ready for long-term disposal. The activity required to decommission
these facilities at Sellafield bears no relation to the work required to decommission
modern nuclear facilities. Operators of nuclear power stations being constructed under
the Government's new build programme are required to publish plans detailing how these
facilities will be decommissioned and the operators themselves are liable for the
costs associated with this decommissioning work.</p><p> </p>
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