Decommissioning from ground level: Sizewell and the uncertainties of faith

This chapter identifies several uncertainties and proposes the basis of a research programme to look into them, but other unidentified uncertainties and impacts clearly exist outside a strict power plant-geography paradigm. It addresses this research in three steps: those are identification of generic decommissioning uncertainties; derivation of socially significant considerations by extrapolating identified uncertainties within a geographical context; application of findings within a policy framework to suggest a future research programme. Estimates of the number of truck loads needed for decommissioning materials are elusive, but in the construction phase of Sizewell B as many as 160,000 deliveries will be made, or over 200 loaded vehicle movements into and out of the site per day. The lack of experience requires accepting on faith that technical ingenuity is capable of solving all problems, present and future, associated with decommissioning. Without near-term attention to some of the more non-technical aspects of decommissioning, nuclear programmes will slip further behind as more questions emerge.