Technical Meeting on Funding for Waste Management and Decommissioning

Understanding financial liabilities attached to the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle and to the future decommissioning of nuclear facilities is a crucial step towards establishing reliable schemes for providing the funds required for programme implementation.

The Technical Meeting on Funding for Waste Management and Decommissioning focuses on prospective capital and operating expenditures associated with the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle (from spent fuel storage to final disposal), other operational waste and the waste emerging from decommissioning of nuclear power plants and other nuclear facilities. Estimating the costs attached to such projects and activities, identifying their drivers, and exploring ways to fund them, are the main topics to be discussed.

The purpose of the meeting is to heighten awareness on this topic among Member States — particularly (but not limited to) embarking Member States. Two main topics will be covered:

(1) basic principles of funding schemes, including mapping from ‘overnight’ costs to contribution schedules, sources of risk and risk mitigation approaches; and

(2) cost estimation, including for waste emerging from the back end of the fuel cycle and for decommissioning of nuclear facilities, dealing with risks and uncertainties in the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle, and spent nuclear fuel management costs and cost breakdown structures (CBS).