Cross-Country Survey on the Decommissioning of Commercial Nuclear Reactors: Status, Insights and Knowledge Gaps

In this survey paper, we bring together the insights from six country case studies on decommissioning commercial nuclear power plants (NPPs). Nuclear decommissioning has often been overlooked in past literature but will gain relevance in future research as more and more NPPs reach the ends of their respective lifetimes. The six countries we selected for our research have commercial nuclear industries that span a wide spectrum in terms of organization, regulation, financial provisions, and production of decommissioning services. Based on the cross comparison of countries and their approaches to decommissioning, we highlight a series of gaps in the existing research that we and other researchers should fill in order to derive best practices for the commercial decommissioning industry.