Recommendation 9

While the cost of decommissioning represents a substantial liability for the UK taxpayer, the NDA was keen to point out that it also raises substantial income—around £800m a year—through commercial opportunities including the export of advice, skills and technologies to other countries with nuclear sites to decommission. The NDA has provided advice to, for example, Japan in relation to the clean-up at Fukushima, Ukraine in relation to Chernobyl, as well as the US, France and Canada. It told us that the UK was a world leader in nuclear power generation from the 1950s onwards and is now a world leader in decommissioning of civil nuclear sites, providing opportunities for growth in this area that could be exploited further to increase income, particularly when working internationally.17