Power Engineering - World Nuclear Association says nuclear least cost option

2 December 2005 - A new World Nuclear Association report, which distills recent independent studies, concludes that nuclear power has become, in most major countries, the least-cost means of producing added base-load electricity.

Entitled The New Economics of Nuclear Power and prepared by an international team of industry experts, the WNA Report focuses on economic costs and attaches no weight to other attributes of nuclear energy.

"At this stage in the nuclear renaissance, this is the most definitive analysis of the costs of building and operating nuclear power plants in the 21st century," said John Ritch, the WNA's Director General. "Nuclear power has already attained widespread recognition for its benefits in fossil pollution
abatement, near-zero greenhouse gas emissions, price stability, and security of energy supply. The impressive new development is that these virtues are now a cost-free bonus, because nuclear energy has become the world's least expensive way to generate electricity."

"Nuclear energy's pre-eminence economically and environmentally has two implications for government policy," said Ritch. "First, governments should ensure that nuclear licensing and safety oversight are not only rigorous but also efficient in facilitating timely deployment of advanced power reactors. Second, governments should be bold in incentivizing the transformation to clean-energy economies, recognizing that such short-term stimulus will, in the case of nuclear power, simply accelerate desirable changes that now have their own long-term momentum."

Among the work incorporated into the WNA Report are recent studies by such respected bodies as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the UK's Royal Academy of Engineering, the International Energy Agency (IEA), and the Nuclear Energy Agency of the OECD (NEA).

The WNA Report finds that the increased competitiveness of nuclear power is the result of cost reductions in all aspects of nuclear economics: construction, financing, operations, and waste management and decommissioning.

Among the cost-lowering factors are the evolution to standardized reactor designs, shorter construction periods, new financing techniques, more efficient generating technologies, higher rates of reactor utilization (i.e. increased capacity factors), and longer plant lifetimes.

The WNA Report highlights and confirms IEA-NEA comparisons based on data assembled even before recent surges in fossil prices. Total electricity costs for power plant construction and operation were calculated at two interest rates. At 10 per cent, mid-range generating costs per kilowatt-hour are nuclear at 4.0 cents, coal at 4.7 cents, and natural gas at 5.1 cents. At a 5 per cent interest rate, mid-range costs per kWh fall to nuclear at 2.6 cents, coal at 3.7 cents, and natural gas at 4.3 cents. Increased fossil fuel prices tilt this balance still further toward nuclear power.

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