type have in the past come mainly from Russia. In fact, Russia formerly accepted returned SF from those surrounding countries to which it had supplied the fuel (as the USSR) and it has expressed a will at the political level to resume this practice.

Private, commercial enterprise: in the radwaste area, there are examples of private initiatives being able to respond more flexibly to the requirements of partners and thus being able to site potentially controversial facilities. In the international arena, initiatives at the beginning of this decade were the Non-Proliferation Trust (NPT) proposal and the Pangea Project. Both had solid technical and economic concepts behind them, but neither led to success, primarily because the necessary top-down support was lacking.

Bottom-up self-help group: this is based on the concept of countries with a common problem, which they cannot easily solve alone, coming together to explore common solutions. The Arius Association, founded in 2002 (see www.arius-world.org), is an example of this type of self-help organisation. More recently, a number of small central European countries have begun to discuss the option of developing shared repositories and there have been similar concepts from Latin American countries.

Supra-national decisions and organisation: this terminology is applied to the case where the initiative is taken by a special body that organises or coordinates a number of nations in a specific area. There are already such entities in the nuclear field, the prime examples being the IAEA, the EU and the NEA.

7.6. Costs and financing

7.6.1. Cost estimates

The costs of waste management, in particular for SF and HLW, have become a topic of increasing interest and controversy over the past several years. Originally, relatively little attention was paid to this issue, since the contribution of these back-end costs to total fuel cycle costs is relatively small. Typically, for nuclear-produced electricity, 60 per cent of the cost represents capital costs, 20 per cent operation and maintenance and 20 per cent fuel costs (NEA, 1993). The back-end costs alone are then typically 5–10 per cent, or up to about half the overall fuel costs.

On an absolute scale, however, the costs are high. The front-end of the most common nuclear fuel cycle (uranium purchase, conversion, enrichment and fuel fabrication) and the back-end (transport, reprocessing if done, encapsulation of SF or HLW and disposal) each cost about the same, namely US$800–900 per kg of uranium (NEA, 1994). The cost of a repository may depend more on radioactivity and hazardous lifetimes of the wastes than on volume of waste, but that will depend on the design. These factors have to be taken into account in comparisons. When it is considered that a large LWR (1000 MWe) will use around 25 tonnes per year, this shows that fuel cycle costs are tens of millions of US dollars per year. The mass or volume of spent fuel from a PHWR (e.g., CANDU) is three or four times that of a LWR, on a per kWh basis (due to a lower specific activity of the fuel).

For the front-end of the nuclear fuel cycle, estimates of this sort are fairly reliable, since none of the component prices vary widely. In fact, the low dependence of nuclear power costs on the cost of the raw material, uranium, is one of the strengths of this

energy form. For back-end costs, there are much greater problems. The only currently feasible back-end strategy that does not involve continuing expenditure for indefinite storage is deep geological disposal – and there has not yet been a deep repository implemented for disposal of HLW or SF. Disposal entails very large capital costs up front and, as long as the discounted capital costs are greater than the discounted annual expenditure for storage, it can pay to continue storing.

The numerous estimates of future costs that have been made by different national programmes vary very widely. Some examples are given in Table 7.3, which is based on a study by the IAEA (IAEA, 2002).

The differences in cost estimates can be caused by many factors. Most important, perhaps, is that the different programmes do not use the same parameters in their costing. For example, the USA estimate includes all aspects such as transport, licensing, public involvement, etc.; the Belgian figures are purely for disposal in a deep repository. These differences make a direct comparison of the figures problematic. Other major differences are caused by the quantities of SF or HLW that are assumed to be emplaced in the repository. Although this makes a large difference, there are economies of scale, so that large programmes end with lower unit costs. For example, the Table 7.4 lists the figures reported by NEA (1994), for undiscounted costs of encapsulation and disposal of SF.

Although these figures have since been revised, they demonstrate well the fact that the fixed (capital) costs associated with implementing a deep repository are large relative to the variable inventory-dependent (operating) cost elements.

Table 7.3

Estimated cost of HLW/SF management

operating and shutdown NPPs as well as HLW from defence activities. The total cost estimate includes the costs of repository, transportation and other associated programme costs.

a The costs given in this table are based on reported cost estimates from around 2000; currency conversion rates from 2003 have, however, been used. The most important conversion ratios here are: 1 Euro = 1.61 Canadian Dollars = 1.22 US Dollars (2003).

190 C. McCombie

Table 7.5

Financing arrangements

6 billion (EU, 1999). The management of the accumulated funds also varies from country to country. Some examples are given in Table 7.5.

Even after the total costs have been estimated and the financing mechanisms agreed, there are contentious issues to be sorted out. In particular, where the total costs