Decommissioning & Waste Management Costing Software

International Structure for Decommissioning Costing (ISDC) of Nuclear Installations jointly issued by OECD /Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA), International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and European Commission (EC). Complete document in PDF format is available here.

Cost estimation for the decommissioning of nuclear facilities can vary considerably in format, content and practice both within and across countries. These differences may have legitimate reasons but make the process of reviewing estimates complicated and the estimates themselves difficult to defend. Hence, the joint initiative of the OECD/NEA, IAEA, EC was undertaken to propose a standard itemisation of decommissioning costs either directly for the production of cost estimates or for mapping estimates onto a standard, common structure for purposes of comparison. The published International Structure for Decommissioning Costing (ISDC) of Nuclear Installation updates the earlier itemisation published in 1999 and takes into account experience accumulated thus far. The revised cost itemisation structure has sought to ensure that all costs within the planned scope of a decommissioning project may be reflected.

ISDC is considered as:

• Project oriented, systematic list of typical decommissioning activities developed for presenting the costs for various decommissioning project of all types of nuclear installations;
• Standardized hierarchical structure with three numbered level aggregating the data bottom to top – opened down to the third numbered level for any user;
• Common platform for presenting of decommissioning cost for any nuclear facility as for type and size; complexity of systems and structures and radiological conditions (including the installation terminating the operation after accident).

At the highest Level 1, eleven Principal activities are identified:

01  Pre-decommissioning actions
02  Facility shutdown activities
03  Additional activities for safe enclosure or entombment
04  Dismantling activities within the controlled area
05  Waste processing, storage and disposal
06  Site infrastructure and operation
07  Conventional dismantling and demolition and site restoration
08  Project management, engineering and support
09  Research and development
10  Fuel and nuclear material
11  Miscellaneous costs

ISDC can be used for:

• Harmonised and transparent presentation of costs for decommissioning projects - facilitate the communication between stakeholders involved in decommissioning;
• Common understanding of presented decommissioning cost - promoting the uniformity and traceability of data and avoiding inconsistency or contradictions;
• Identification of decommissioning activities for a decommissioning project – checklist of activities;
• Definition of harmonised assumptions and boundary conditions for decommissioning costing cases;
• Base for cost calculation structures;
• Benchmarking of costs for decommissioning projects;
• Platform for additional decommissioning data processing;

Download the complete ISDC book in PDF