Report on waste burial charges

One of the requirements placed upon nuclear power reactor licensees by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is for the licensees to periodically adjust the estimate of the cost of decommissioning their plants, in dollars of the current year, as part of the process to provide reasonable assurance that adequate funds for decommissioning will be available when needed. This report, which is scheduled to be revised annually, contains the development of a formula for escalating decommissioning cost estimates that is acceptable to the NRC. The sources of information to be used in the escalation formula are identified, and the values developed for the escalation of radioactive waste burial costs, by site and by year, are given. The licensees may use the formula, the coefficients, and the burial escalation factors from this report in their escalation analyses, or they may use an escalation rate at least equal to the escalation approach presented herein. This second revision of NUREG-1307 contains corrected spreadsheets on the disposal costs for the reference PWR and the reference BWR and the ratios of disposal costs at the Washington, Nevada, and South Carolina sites for the years 1986 and 1988, superseding the values given in the October 1989 issue of this report. In addition, spreadsheets on the disposal costs for the reference reactors and ratios of disposal costs at the three burial sites for the year 1991 are provided. 5 refs., 2 tabs