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Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

I can never wrap my head around why costs like this are so high. If you consider most industrial processes involve digging stuff out of the ground and turning it into something else, and that work is done by people using machines built by other people also made of stuff dug out the ground then the cost must surely be bounded by bits of land you have to dig up and people you have to pay to do stuff. It’s not like cleaning up Sellafield requires a 100 high stack of Da Vinci paintings or anything else artificially rare like that.

So with £60k salaries all round costing the employer £120k in total and a 25 year work schedule — that’s £3m per worker. Does that mean 90k people are involved?

Maybe the only part of this that’s so crazy is the 25 year project timeline? By contrast the British Armed Forces must be employing about the same number of people over about the same amount of time?

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Consider, for example, that a large portion of the labor on these projects must be conducted in large negative-pressure gloveboxes. Just the engineering to design these gloveboxes and systems for loading materials in and out of them, without releasing contaminated particulates, can be a significant expense. You then have to operate an extensive environmental monitoring program, health and safety precautions and services for workers, and at the end of this all in-out time takes long enough that workers aren't able to actually work for a good portion of their shift.

The safety concerns here are significant and complex. For example, remediation efforts in Los Alamos have struggled with a high rate of rotator cuff injuries among the workers due to the placement of pass-through locks in the gloveboxes. This has necessitated development of a new glove box design.

When working with dangerous materials, every individual step of the process becomes much more complex. You end up with more staff to perform safety and environmental monitoring than to actually do the work. Workers need more workers to help them don and doff protective equipment. It's a bit like working in space.

I remember an example from another nuclear site cleanup. If you work on a part potentially contaminated you cannot used a normal vacuum cleaner that will disperse some contaminated dust, so you need a special purpose device. Then you cannot dispose easily of the dust, so you need another process. Since the device is also critical you probably need some regular maintenance or tests, so you need someone to manage them.

So basically every single step is much more complex with the associated cost.

I imagine that a lot of that cost is project and timeline risk mitigation - what happens if people NIMBY you repeatedly and demand ever more insane mitigation protocols and you end up having to move to Antarctica to build a space program for launching the top ten meters of the entire British Isles into Sagittarius A*.

Could also build a giant granite pyramid over the entire site. Should keep the Cumbrians in wages for a couple of hundred years.

It wouldn't surprise me if that actually increased the amount of radioactivity released.

I have another example - asbestos. With all the protective gear people can work usually only half of normal shift. Because wearing proper mask and tight overall is very very difficult. Cleaning nuclear site adds probably radiation exposure time.

On other hand for this insane money a capable group could automate all the machines and do the cleanup without humans on-site. Especially when it is not the only one site worldwide for cleaning.

From the linked report:

> The size of the nuclear decommissioning liability reflects the expected future costs in relation to decommissioning activity, spanning over 100 years. This means actual annual expenditure is much lower than the total liability as noted earlier in this chapter.

So it's a cost over 100 years.

I don't know if that's the case here, but costs for large, long-term projects are often quoted by year of expenditure. Costs to be incurred more than a few years out are adjusted for expected inflation, with total costs the sum of all these inflation-adjusted numbers.

This is how public works capital projects are typically quoted in the United States, and it's one reason budgets grow so quickly, especially if timelines keep getting stretched out into the future--e.g. California High-speed Rail.

EDIT: The report's figures are discounted. From the report[1], page 8: "Many of the larger items described represent spending commitments spanning years into the future (in some cases, beyond 100 years). In accordance with accounting rules, these items are adjusted to reflect the time value of money, where expected future payments are discounted to provide a present value. "

[1] https://www.ukgi.org.uk/download/5767/?tmstv=1701723390 via https://www.ukgi.org.uk/2023/11/22/clccs-annual-report-on-th...

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