We’ve been discussing nuclear energy the past couple of months in terms of how the United States and Canada compare, some interesting topics being discussed at industry events such as Platts Nuclear Energy and the Advanced Reactors and Technical Summit and the Supreme Court’s stay of the Clean Power Plan. Nuclear energy as we know it today, and how we will know it tomorrow hinge on a multitude of things ranging from legislation, technology, general public education and perceptions and climate change. One facet of nuclear energy that we have not delved much into is costs and standards and how they play into the future of nuclear.
As countries around the world look for ways to increase low-carbon energy sources, nuclear power is an essential technology in the future global energy mix. But with historical costs, especially in the U.S. on the rise, what can we learn from history, and other countries, to reduce costs and make it a more cost competitive energy source?
Recent studies have looked into the historical costs of nuclear power. A paper released earlier this year, historical construction costs of global nuclear power reactors, expands the scope in its analysis to provide costs of 58 percent of all reactors built globally.
The paper plotted reactor construction timelines in the U.S. and found that after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, costs and durations were 2.2 times higher. It attributes this to licensing, regulatory requirements and back-fit requirements.
After expanding the scope, the paper concluded that, “how costs evolve over time appears to be dependent on different regional, historical, and institutional factors at play. The large variance we see in cost trends over time and across different countries – even with similar nuclear reactor technologies – suggests that cost drivers other than learning-by-doing have dominated the cost experience of nuclear power construction. Factors such as utility structure, reactor size, regulatory regime, and international collaboration may play a larger effect. Therefore, drawing any strong conclusions about future nuclear power costs based on one country’s experience – especially the US experience in the 1970s and 1980s – would be ill-advised.”
Another interesting resource that delves into the cost of nuclear is the International Energy Agency (IEA) 2015 Nuclear Energy Technology Roadmap. In the updated roadmap the IEA talks about nuclear energy’s role in providing a stable source of low-carbon electricity and how to drive down costs. A couple of its key findings state:
- Nuclear energy is a mature low-carbon technology, which has followed a trend towards increased safety levels and power output to benefit from economies of scale.
- Small modular reactors could extend the market for nuclear energy by providing power to smaller grid systems or isolated markets where larger nuclear plants are not suitable.
- Most of the anticipated growth in nuclear capacity in the coming decades will come with the deployment of “large” Gen III reactors.
The IEA roadmap also discusses how standardization and new technologies that create constructability and modularity will help reduce costs.
So what are some ways we can decrease costs and increase momentum?
- Stable regulations
- Design standardization
- Multiple reactors at the same site
- Smaller reactors/new technologies
- Educating the public/changing their negative perception about nuclear power
There are definitely lessons we can glean from other countries that have kept costs lower such as France and South Korea where they have maintained stable regulations, had a single utility and built reactors in pairs at single sites. Since the U.S. government and utilities vary across state lines, what has worked in some nations, is not exactly replicable, but it is still worth a deeper look to assist in how nuclear is used and developed in the next 15-30 years.
