Designing decommissioning into new reactor designs

One of the lessons learned from decommissioning of existing reactors has been that decommissioning was not given much thought when these reactors were designed some three or four decades ago. Recently, the nuclear power has seen a worldwide resurgence and many new advanced reactor designs are either on the market or nearing design completion. Most of these designs are evolutionary in nature and build on the existing and proven technologies. They also incorporate many improvements and take advantage of the substantial operating experience. Nevertheless, by and large, the main factors driving the design of new reactors are the safety features, safeguards considerations, and the economic factors. With a large decommissioning experience that already exists in the nuclear industry, and with average decommissioning costs at around six hundred million dollars for each reactor in today's dollars, it is necessary that decommissioning factors also be considered as a part of the early design effort. Even though decommissioning may be sixty years down the road from the time they go on line, it is only prudent that new designs be optimized for eventual decommissioning, along with the other major considerations. (authors)