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Huhne’s blast at wind-up bill cost
Energy Secretary Chris Huhne
The previous Labour government has been accused of leaving a £4 billion black hole in the budget for decommissioning nuclear power stations, including two reactors in Lancashire.
Chris Huhne, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, is locked in talks with the Treasury to secure more funding and has even had to raise the issue at one of the coalition government’s first cabinet meetings.
The two nuclear reactors at Heysham, near Morecambe, which are owned by power giant EDF and generate 4% of the country’s energy, are due to be decommissioned over the next 13 years.
The cost of decommissioning the UK’s old nuclear power plants is expected to be in balance this year with an estimated £850m cost the taxpayer next year, rising to £950m in 2012-13 and £1.1bn for each of the following two years.
The annual budget for the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) is £3bn.
Mr Huhne said: “My predecessors avoided taking tough decisions and now it is much more expensive to deal with than if we had tackled it back in the 1970s and 1980s.
“The costs are such that my department is not so much the Department of Energy and Climate Change, as the department of Nuclear legacy and Bits of Other Things.”
A DECC spokesman said: “We are working closely with the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) to ensure adequate funds are available this year.
“It is the case that the long-term funding of the NDA’s work, and the projected fall away of its commercial income, will need to be addressed in future spending rounds with safety being paramount.”
The Heysham reactors, which employ more than 1,000 people and add £50m to the local economy, was pinpointed as a possible location for a new reactor by the last government, but the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition have said any new nuclear power station will have to be built without any public subsidy.
A spokesman for the Labour Party was unavailable for comment on the issue.
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Wednesday 08 February 2012
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