Introducing Nuclear Power Plants in an OECD Country: Size Influence on the External Factors

Abstract

A traditional investment evaluation approach is generally closed with a financial lifecycle performances investigation based on multiple analysis of Discounted Cash Flows (DCF). The international literature is rich of studies about the economics of new Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs), considering the classical accounts related to Construction, Operation & Maintenance, Fuel and Decommissioning. Financial analyses are important but the evaluation of such projects needs a multidimensional approach: besides economics, other technical, social and market factors have to be taken into account too. The Integrated model for the Competitiveness Assessment of SMRs (INCAS), developed by “Politecnico di Milano” cooperating with the IAEA, is designed to analyze the choice of the better NPP size as a multidimensional problem. The INCAS model aims to become the framework for the comparison between “Deliberately Small Medium Reactors (SMRs)” and “Large Reactors (LRs)”, with respect to a specific country situation or “scenario”. In particular the INCAS’s module “External Factors” evaluates the impact of factors not considered in the traditional DCF methods (siting and grid constraints, impact on the national industrial system, etc…) but critical for the decision of the plant size to deploy. This paper presents a completely updated version of the “External Factors model” framework under development since 2007. First it presents each factor, providing an adequate background and the quantification procedure, and then each factor is quantified respect to the Italian case. The IRIS reactor has been chosen as SMR representative. Even if the results are related to the Italian situation, they can apply to most of the European countries and the framework of the model can be used for all the countries. The results show that SMRs have better performances than LRs with respect to the external factors, in general and in the Italian scenario in particular.

Icone19-43429 a Framework for the Selection of the Right Nuclear Power Plant

“…He states that traditional approaches for projects' strategic evaluation, based only on monetary indicators such as ROI or NPV, suffer from too narrow perspective and inability of considering potential nonfinancial benefits, which often characterize strategic investments. (Locatelli et al 2010) SMRs were developed during the '50s and the '60s: then, in order to exploit the "economy of scale" the design was scaled to 1GWe and more. But innovative SMRs exploit their small/medium size to develop features giving them benefits in economics, as well as in safety and operational flexibility: it is already been proved that, in a certain scenario, the loss of "economy of scale" can be balanced by the "economies of multiples" such as standardization, learning, cost sharing, modularization etc.…”

“…Equity Employed and Max Cash Outflow evaluate the expected impact of self-financing: sequencing NPP unit construction in the right way, investors can capitalize power production from the first installed units, reducing need for debt or equity. This is the so called "selffinancing option"; • a specific model (Locatelli et al, 2010) Point 3. The hierarchical structure for the implementation of fuzzy AHP is presented in figure 1.…”

“…INCAS compares the choice of investment in SMRs or LRs providing monetary and non-monetary indicators. (Carelli et al, 2009) and (Boarin & Ricotti, 2009) presented economic and financial comparisons of Large and Small-Medium designs, while non-monetary factors are addressed in (Locatelli et al, 2010).…”