Clean break for engineers

The world’s nuclear reactors are showing their age. Almost 200 of the 434 nuclear reactors in operation worldwide are due to be retired by 2040, at a cost of more than $100 billion, according to the International Energy Agency.

In Europe alone, dozens of reactors are expected to be dismantled within the next decade, with all but one of the UK’s existing plants due to be closed down. A report published last year by Infiniti Research forecast that the nuclear decommissioning market in Europe would grow at a rate of 43.1 percent between 2014 and 2018.

All of these reactors must be safely cleaned up and decommissioned, a huge global effort that was made yet more pressing by the Fukushima disaster in Japan in March 2011, after which countries such as Germany and Switzerland announced they would be phasing out nuclear power altogether.

To add to the difficulties, only 10 reactors have been fully decommissioned so far, meaning considerable uncertainties remain about the total cost of the task ahead. In Germany, for example, there are concerns that the 36 billion euros the utility companies have set aside to clean up the country’s nuclear plants may not be enough, despite being the largest such sum in the world.