ABSTRACT
The issue of decommissioning has influenced nuclear energy policy in the UK. Resources are being diverted from fading areas of nuclear research and development into the lucrative technological world of decommissioning. Ironically, the decommissioning challenge is regarded as a timely godsend to a beleaguered nuclear industry in the UK. Money and engineering talent will successfully be deployed to make decommissioning work, but the practice will never become acceptable to a broad cross-section of the public. The decommissioning issue re-emerged in 1989 with the next major nuclear public inquiry in the UK, this time into the Central Electricity Generating Board Sizewell B clone proposed for the Hinkley C site in Somerset. Right at the end of the 1988–1989 Parliamentary sessions the Energy Secretary announced that the government would write off all the debts of the Magnox reactors and would underwrite both the decommissioning costs and the waste disposal expenditures.
