Historical construction costs of global nuclear power reactors

By J. Lovering, Arthur Yip, Ted Nordhaus. 2016

271 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The existing literature on the construction costs of nuclear power reactors has focused almost exclusively on trends in construction costs in only two countries, the United States and France, and during two decades, the 1970s and 1980s. These analyses, Koomey and Hultman (2007); Grubler (2010), and Escobar-Rangel and Leveque (2015), study only 26% of reactors built globally between 1960 and 2010, providing an incomplete picture of the economic evolution of nuclear power construction. This study curates historical reactor-specific overnight construction cost (OCC) data that broaden the scope of study substantially, covering the full cost history for 349 reactors in the US, France, Canada, West Germany, Japan, India, and South Korea, encompassing 58% of all reactors built globally. We find that trends in costs have varied significantly in magnitude and in structure by era, country, and experience. In contrast to the rapid cost escalation that characterized nuclear construction in the United States, we find evidence of much milder cost escalation in many countries, including absolute cost declines in some countries and specific eras. Our new findings suggest that there is no inherent cost escalation trend associated with nuclear technology.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dfa7118d0d49e386e24d3d5c04d09e7168e013b0

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In Aerospace Engineering

1. S. Samadi
2. V. Litvinenko

In Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality

1. S. Samadi
2. V. Litvinenko

In Statistics and Probability

1. J. Jasiūnas
2. Peter D. Lund
3. Jani Mikkola

Citations in the corpus

• Energy system resilience – A review (2021, background): “Specific security concerns with nuclear power have been an important factor for decreasing public acceptance and increasing the costs of this technology [111].”
• Young People's Burden: Requirement of Negative CO2 Emissions (2016, unknown): “Recent costs of Chinese and South Korean light water reactors are in the range USD 2000–3000 per kilowatt (Chinese Academy of Engineering, 2015; Lovering et al., 2016).”
• The experience curve theory and its application in the field of electricity generation technologies – A literature review (2018, background): “This significant variation indicates that the experience curve concept may not be suitable for explaining these technologies’ past and possible future cost developments [78,79].”
• The Role of Hydrocarbons in the Global Energy Agenda: The Focus on Liquefied Natural Gas (2020, background): “Strengthening security measures taken during the construction of the third-generation reactors enables the mitigation of risk of accidents, but increases the unitary cost of the generated energy (more than doubling the cost, compared to fully depreciated facilities) [59].”
• The political logics of clean energy transitions (2018, unknown): “23 McNerney et al. (2011); Lovering et al. (2016).”