The planned cost of closing Spanish nuclear power plants and treating radioactive waste already reaches 20,367 million euros, after adding another 165 million (0.8% more) in twelve months, in the first complete exercise with a new general plan of radioactive waste (PGRR) in force.
This is the last estimate of Enresa, the public company that manages the waste and is responsible for dismantling the nuclear. The most relevant departure of the PGRR is that of the dismantling of the reactors that, according to the last annual report of Enresa, as of January of this year it already reached a new record of 17,520.5 million, with an increase of 90 million in one year, 0.5% more. The planned cost chapter that grows is the one that encompasses the so -called “electricity tariff”, which includes the management of nuclear waste and spent fuel. It is already at 2,846.8 million, after adding 75 million more in twelve months with a much more pronounced growth, of 2.7%.
Adding the rest of the activities, such as the management of the nuclear fuel factory of the state company ENUSA in Court, Salamanca, the planned bill of the set of activities provided for in the PGRR already is around 20,500 million.
Sources from the Ecological Transition underline that “Costs are updated every year based on the best estimates, so that an increase of one year cannot be extrapolated to the rest.” They also emphasize that the inflation of 2024, of 2.8%, was higher than the increased cost increase.
The money to cover these costs has to come from a background that manages the Enresa itself and nourishes the contributions of the electric while the reactors work. At the end of 2024 that fund had 8,677 million, 8.4% more than a year earlier, after the rise (in force since July of last year) of 30% of the so -called Enresa rate, which the electricity has resorted to the courts.
The cost of dismantling and waste management is one of the great keys to the underground negotiation between government and electric to review the progressive closure of the nuclear that agreed in 2019. A negotiation that, according to the department directed by Sara Aagesen, is not such because the electric ones intend to load those activities to consumers and the executive refuses to do so.
“They want a tax reduction, they want part of the costs of dismantling and the management of radioactive waste to pay it among all,” summarized a few days ago the Secretary of State for Energy, Joan Groizard, who made it clear that “those costs are not going to transfer them to the whole of the citizenship.”
Endesa and Iberdrola have been trying to agree with Naturgy for months to try to postpone the closure of the first group of the Almaraz Central (Cáceres), scheduled for 2027. It is subject to that reduction of rates and taxes that the Government rejects. The executive would only open to extend the life of nuclear if the electric ones assume the costs. And the two main companies in the sector have raised millionaire claims in the courts for the rise of the Enresa rate. Endesa asks 454 million and Iberdrola, another 324 million, as the country said.
Until last year, the electricity business of the electricity remained very profitable, according to the latest accounts of the subsidiary of one of the main companies in Spain in Spain, Iberdrola. In 2024, Iberdrola Nuclear Generation scored 277 million profits (compared to almost 363 million 2023). This subsidiary has declared between 2021 and 2024 joint benefits of about 1,270 million. His best year was 2021, when the price of light began to shoot and his benefit reached 574 million in a single year. These figures contrast with the almost 1.1 billion losses declared by that subsidiary in the 2013-2020 period.
In the long term, in the background is the enormous uncertainty about what will be the real cost of waste treatment, which maintain their danger for thousands of years. A very recent and close example is in France, the great European nuclear power. In May, the Enresa Gala, Andra, reviewed the cost of treatment of French radioactive waste, including the construction of a future deep geological storage (AGP) such as the one that projects inresa, baptized there as Cigéo, and which should begin to receive radioactive material in 2050.
To a 150 -year -old horizon, Andra has gone from the 25,000 million euros estimated in 2016 to a fork between 26,100 and 37,500 million. In the worst case, it would involve an extra cost of up to 60% compared to the forecast of less than a decade ago.
In the opinion of the President of the Renewable Foundation, Fernando Ferrando, while in Spain from the electric companies “the effort is to reduce fees and taxes”, the question is “how much we collect now so that we do not pay all later.” And there is the unknown of whether the background of Enresa will suffice. Before the summer, another high position of ecological transition, the Secretary of State for the Environment, Hugo Morán (without direct competences in this matter), came to recognize in a public act organized by the consultant Pedersen that the current rate, even with the last applied ascent, does not cover the needs, according to sources present in that meeting.
Since January 2021, the planning bill has shot at more than 2,320 million, although the magnitudes are not comparable, due to the entry into force of a new PGRR with more consistent forecasts to reality. The jump is even more brutal in the case of waste. In 2019, when there was still on paper with a centralized temporal warehouse (the so -called ATC), this game was 1,275 million. Now there are more than 2.8 billion.
The explanation is the new scenario without ATC, which made the planned cost of waste management in January 2024 to 2,771.6 million, compared to 1,629.3 million that were still foreseen in January 2023, with the previous PGRRR still in force. This item includes the storage of which Custody France has been for decades, whose return is scheduled in 2027. Its cost, a daily bond of more than 85,000 euros that will be returned when they return to Spain, just reduced for the first time.
For its part, the dismantling of nuclear has gone from 15,654 million in January 2023 to those mentioned 17,520.5 million in January 2025. Almost 1.900 million more in just two years.
The resources of the fund financed by the PGRR have gone from 6,596 million in December 2020 to those mentioned 8,677 million. In ten years, the balance of the fund has more than duplicate: in 2014, it counted about 4.2 billion. Then, it was estimated that dismantling the nuclear would cost ‘only’ about 12,000 million. Keep in mind that until 2019 Enresa took as a last year of reference for its estimates of the PGRR costs in 2070. Since then it extends to 2100. In addition, the public company considered in 2019 that the nuclear would close in 2028, compared to 2035 that is now contemplated for the closing of the last reactor.
“Responsible and safe management”
The current regulations require Enresa to prepare in the first half of each year an updated financial economic study of the cost of the activities contemplated in the PGRR. It requires evaluating “the adequacy to said cost of the current financial mechanisms”, in compliance with the European Directive on the matter, which requires a “responsible and safe management of the spent nuclear fuel and the radioactive waste.”
The PGRR approved by ecological transition in December 2023 replaced the current until then, dating from 2006 and had expired the frying of thirteen years (since 2010). He introduced very important novelties, such as the definitive abandonment of the ATC and the distribution of waste in independent temporary stores (ATI), the construction of the AGP and the rise of that rate, which had been frozen almost fifteen years, after successive reports of the Court of Accounts warning of the deficit of that fund.
This agency urged the Government in February 2022 to “annually review the tax elements of the two rates that fall on the titular companies of the nuclear power plants”: the one that is calculated by each megawatt hour (MWh) produced, which is the one that rose in July last year 30% (up to 10.36 euros/MWh), and the tax on the production of nuclear fuel spent Mariano Rajoy introduced in 2012 to contain the so -called rate deficit (difference between regulated income and costs of the electrical system) that then threatened to take bankruptcy to the sector.
The new radioactive waste plan formalized the abandonment of the ATC project, which the Pedro Sánchez government ruled out for the lack of social consensus, in a decision that electricity has also appealed. The PP tried to locate the ATC in Villar de Cañas (Cuenca), in a project whose cost threatened to shoot for doubts about the suitability of the chosen lands, and between suspicions due to the link with the project of a company linked to businessman Ignacio López del Hierro, then husband of the former general secretary of the PP and former president of Castilla-La Mancha, María Dolores de Cospedal.
Instead of the ATC, the socialist government opted for a more expensive solution, distribute waste in seven independent warehouses, as an intermediate step to the definitive burial of waste in the AGP, scheduled for 2072 and that Enresa and the Nuclear Safety Council (CSN) have requested (in vain) shield by law so that it is underway “as soon as possible”.
Source: www.eldiario.es
