dc.description.abstract | “Decommissioning Nuclear Power Plants” refers to the actions taken when a power company decides to close its nuclear power plant permanently. These include survey of materials, installations and soil for radioactivity levels; decontamination and dismantling of equipment, building; and subsequently manage the resulting radioactive wastes. The “Nuclear Reactor Facilities Regulation Act” of the ROC has strict rules governing nuclear power plant decommissioning, mandates that each nuclear facility has to have a plan and a set of cost estimates for its decommissioning, to ensure accumulation of enough funding for its final decommissioning.
The goals of costing may vary according to the various stages of the actions. For example, during the planning stage, the goal is to allocate enough total budge for the plan; after its approval, the regulatory authority and the stake holders may be more interested in raising enough resources for the actions. There is no standard format for cost estimations in nuclear power plants decommissioning. It very much depends on differences in governmental regulations, time lines, and other constraints. These differences result in lack of visibilities and complexities in planning. If there is a set of standardized guide lines, various plans can be compared, and thereby improved, and hopefully able to mirror realities.
The Nuclear Energy Agency of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD/NEA) published a “International Structure for Decommissioning Costing (ISDC) of Nuclear Installations” in 2012. It is a collaborative effort among OECD/NEA, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the European Commission, aiming at establishing a unified decommissioning costing architecture. These three international organizations hope to promote international co-operations, and use the new guidelines to replace the “Nuclear Decommissioning: A Proposed Standardized List of Items for Costing Purposes” of 1999 (colloquially known as “The Yellow Book”), incorporating members’ experiences. The study revealed that some countries directly adopted the structure proposed by the Yellow Book, while some countries have their own costing methods, and only conducted comparisons with the structure. These lead to varying conclusions, which may be due to differences in country specific evaluation items, and ambiguities in the items. In general, the ISDC are perceived to be able to increase consistencies in costing.
This study started out by introducing the ISDC architecture. Subsequently, this study collected related data from a nuclear power plant “CS” which has been identified as a target for decommissioning, including characteristics of systems and buildings, and take the reactor pressure vessel and internal components as examples to illustrate the procedures and applications of the ISDC architecture. | en_US |