Callan, an institutional investment consulting firm, has announced the results of its 2023 Nuclear Decommissioning Funding Study, outlining insights into the status of nuclear decommissioning funding in the United States.
Callan found nuclear decommissioning trust (NDT) fund balances totaled $81 billion in 2022, down more than $15 billion (15 percent) from 2021, largely due to stock and bond market performance.
The study covers 26 investor-owned and 26 public power utilities with an ownership interest in the 92 operating nuclear reactors and 16 of the nonoperating nuclear reactors in the United States. NDTs are created to pay for the costs of decommissioning a closed nuclear power plant.
“In our analysis, we saw a steep decline in assets as the S&P 500 and Bloomberg Aggregate Indices were down 18 percent and 13 percent, respectively, in 2022,” said Julia Moriarty, the study’s author and co-manager of Callan's Capital Markets Research group.
