Recent Trends in the Adequacy of Nuclear Plant Decommissioning Funding

Concerned about the potential cost and sufficiency of funds to decommission the nation's nuclear power plants, the Congress asked the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) to assess the adequacy, as of December 31, 1997, of electric utilities'; funds to eventually decommission their plants. GAO's report (GAO/RCED-99-75) on this issue addressed three alternative assumption scenarios--baseline (most likely), optimistic, and pessimistic; and was issued in May 1999. This paper updates GAO's baseline assessment of fund adequacy in 1997, and extends the analysis through 2000. In 2000, we estimate that the present value cost to decommission the nation's nuclear plants is about $35 billion; utility fund balances are about $29 billion. Both our two measures of funding adequacy for utilities are on average not only much above ideal levels, but also overall have greatly improved since 1997. However, certain utilities still show less than ideal fund balances and annual contributions. We suggest that the range of these results among the individual utilities is a more important policy measure to assess the adequacy of decommissioning funding than is the funding adequacy for the industry as a whole