The general accounting of fice (GAO) reported in 1999 that the combined value of nuclear power plant owners' decommissioning funds was insufficient to ensure that adequate funding would be available for decommissioning. A current report, NRC Needs More Effective Analysis to Ensure Accumulation of Funds to Decommission Nuolear Power Plants (GAO-04-32), dated October 2003 and released on December 1, updates the 1999 report and evaluates the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's analysis of the owners' funds, as well as the agency's process for acting on reports that indicate that a utility has insufficient decommissioning funds set aside. The current report concludes that the collective status of plant owners' decommissioning fund accounts has improved considerably, but that some individual owners are not accumulating funds at an appropriate rate to ensure decommissioning can be accomplished. The GAO found that "the combined value of the nuclear power plant owners' decommissioning fund accounts in 2000―about $26.9 billion―was about 47 percent greater than needed at that point to ensure that sufficient funds will be available to cover the approximately $33 billion in estimated decommissioning costs when the plants are permanently shut down." The previous report showed that 1997 collective funds were running about 3 percent below what was needed.
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