Follow-up for the years 2000-2002 of productivity studies for the operation of CLAB

SKB hands every year over, on behalf of the power companies, to SKI a cost calculation for spent fuel handling and dismantling of the Swedish nuclear power plants. SKI has tried to investigate the future impact which the growth of money in the Nuclear Waste Fund might give in relation to the change of consumer price index, CPI. The long term yield of the Fund has been related to the change of CPI, as the bigger part of the fund money has been invested in real interest rate bonds, issued by the Swedish state. The cost development has been studied with an index named 'KBS-3-index', which is a basket of weighted factor price indexes based on the SKB programme. Since 1986 and up to 2002, the KBS-3-index has increased about 102%, but CPI only about 70%. If this discrepancy should continue during the whole period when Fund money should be available, the Fund would be insufficient. But the difference between KBS-3-index and CPI might be eliminated due to a future productivity development. At the moment, SKI has no knowledge about future productivity development in the SKB programme. A closer analysis of the productivity and efficiency development in the facilities operated by SKB is therefore applicable. Nearest to study is the productivity at the operation of CLAB, Central Interim Storage Facility for Spent Nuclear Fuel. The work in CLAB is receiving and storing of spent nuclear fuel and core components. The consumption of all production factors can be measured in economical means. Here the total production factors are defined as the sum of the annual operation costs and the sum of annuities for reinvestments during the year. The development of total productivity is increasing slightly, but decreasing in the end. Normal for a new business is that the productivity is rising sharply in the beginning. Here the productivity is slightly decreasing in the beginning, and then rising, decreasing, rising and finally decreasing. The project 'compact storing' was finished in 1992, and the relocation to compact cassettes started in 1993. This is said to be the reason for the large decrease in total productivity that time. The relatively low productivity in 1997 is said to depend on failure of the gearbox in the cassette handling machine. Productivity increases with increased production, is the general experience from industry. The high productivity in 1998 coincides with a big production the same year. The compact storing terminated in 2002. That is the reason for the decrease in productivity then. The reason for the increased productivity up to 2002 is better technology and larger production. CLAB is lacking competition. However, the free power market has depressed the power prices. Analogous it can be expected that CLAB is experiencing a pressure to get the costs down and continue the efforts to increase the productivity. Suitable measures are review of operations, the opening to competition for parts of the works and benchmarking. An important task for CLAB is to decrease the residual heat and radiation from the fuel. From that point of view, the productivity is increasing all the time. That depends on the costs which are rather constant, but the amount of fuel stored is increasing until time for placing it in the repository. The operation of the encapsulation plant and the deep repository as well as the decommissioning service operation could be compared with the operation of CLAB