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Decommissioning Reactors:
A Growth Industry

Decommissioning Offers Business Opportunities

Sales that weren't made

Survival prospects

France forging ahead

Dismantling a single nuclear reactor at the end of its life, for example, could cost from 3 to 100 percent of the original cost, or as much as $1 billion per reactor, according to a recent U.S. congressional report. Since 100 nuclear power plants will be retired and slated for "decommissioning" before the end of the century, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, decommissioning could become the bread-and-butter work of tomorrow's nuclear industry.

• Canada's bid to sell four nuclear reactors to Mexico in the fall of 1980 was returned unopened, even though Ottawa was prepared to finance the entire multibillion dollar purchase price at give-away interest rates.

• Hydro-Québec -- whose only operating reactor, Gentilly-2, is totally surplus to the province's electrical needs -- has decided to stick to its announcement of December, 1981, that it will not consider ordering any more reactors until at least 1990.

• Other prospects -- Argentina, Korea, Formosa, Egypt, Indonesia, and Yugoslavia -- are remote at best.

Despite these dire predictions, the industry has done little to turn to a clearly defined growth area -- the growing number of pressing problems that will have to be tackled in the nuclear field, whether or not CANDU sales recover:

• The recent accident at the Pickering nuclear power plant near Toronto may make it necessary to replace all 390 pressure tubes in each of the plant's four reactors sooner than expected. The industry's current retubing cost estimates run at $80 million per reactor for what is in effect a mini-decommissioning job lasting a year or more and requiring sophisticated new robotics equipment.

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  [Note: the actual cost for retubing two of the four reactors was $700 million, requiring a four-year shutdown of both reactors.]

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• In 1980, a committee of the Ontario Legislature stressed the urgent need for a major study into the safety of CANDU reactors, likely to cost millions of dollars. The committee recommendation, urging a special examination of "catastrophic" accidents, now appears more urgent in light of recent events at Pickering -- but it has yet to be acted upon.

• A method of safely disposing of millions of tons of radioactive wastes must be developed and implemented. In addition to the highly radioactive dismantled reactors and spent nuclear fuel, over 100 million tons of existing uranium mine tailings must be safely disposed of.

• Hydro-Québec's defunct power reactor -- Gentilly-1 -- will soon need to be dismantled: a task which has never before been attempted on such a scale anywhere in the world.

France is also actively researching techniques for packaging, transporting and burying hundreds of truckloads of radioactive reactor rubble -- techniques likely to have numerous valuable spin-offs for industrial robotics & toxic chemical disposal.

By following France's lead and concentrating on these new growth areas, Canada's nuclear industry could forestall one of Ottawa's chief fears: the break-up of the tightly knit teams of nuclear experts essential to Canada's involvement in the industry.

As early as 1977, the U.S. General Accounting Office warned that the collapse of the nuclear industry might leave the public holding the bag with

no nuclear-related organization, nuclear equipment, or individuals expert in the nuclear field capable of dealing with the decommissioning and decontamination problems that could remain for about 100 years after the last reactor is shut down.

In Canada alone, 25 nuclear power reactors will have been in operation by the year 2000 if those currently planned are completed -- each requiring ongoing servicing, provision for high level radioactive waste disposal, and finally decommissioning. [Note: as of 1999, the actual number of CANDU power reactors completed was 25, of which 4 were permanently shut down and 7 were temporarily mothballed, leaving 14 operating (12 in Ontario, one in Quebec, and one in New Brunswick.]

Worldwide, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, "decommissioning of nuclear plants will become a routine industrial activity during the next 20 years." The first of these, with financing from Ottawa, could be Canada's Gentilly-1, giving Canada a head start in a key technology that could comprise the lion's share of the multibillion dollar business of maintaining aging reactors and ultimately giving them a decent burial.