NEA Proposes a New Approach to Funding Radioactive Waste Management & Decommissioning

摘要

The OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) has released a study that proposes a new, “circular” approach to assessing the financial adequacy of funding arrangements for decommissioning and radioactive waste management (RWM). The study proposes to complement current approaches that are based on linear discounting of estimated future costs for decommissioning and waste disposal with an approach that continuously adapts as new information on costs, social preferences, policy objectives, lifetimes or rates of returns on existing assets becomes available. This broader approach is especially relevant to the long-term management and disposal of high-level radioactive wastes (HLW) and spent nuclear fuel (SNF) because of the extremely long timeframes involved in those programs.