The French Pressurised Water Reactor Programme

Abstract

AUTHORS' SUMMARYThe case study reviews the French nuclear Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) Program as an example of successful scaling-up of a complex and capital-intensive energy technology. Starting in the early 1970s, France built 58 PWRs with a total gross installed capacity of 66 GWe. On completion in the year 2000, they produced some 400 TWh/y of electricity, or close to 80% of France's electricity production. The institutional setting that enabled a high degree of standardization, external learning via the use of proven US reactor designs under a Westinghouse license, high regulatory stability, and the effective absence of any public opposition are discussed. The case study then considers the economics of this successful scale-up of nuclear reactor technology identifying a significant cost escalation in real-terms reactor construction costs, but also a remarkable stability in reactor operation costs. This is all the more noteworthy considering the need for load modulation in a system relying as heavily on base-load nuclear as is the case in France.

The Historical Development of the Costs of Nuclear Power

“…No economies-of-scale were observed, rather diseconomies of scale. However, Grubler (2014) argues that the CdC data are heavily biased and omit arbitrily important construction costs components. He compares his estimates with CdC (corrected for omissions) criticizes that Rangel and Leveque (2013) have compared the lowest CdC numbers (73 billion) to the best-guess model estimates 89 billion reported in Grubler (2010), and that Rangel et al (2013) reached the pre-mature conclusion of a significant overestimation of costs and resulting cost escalation of the Grubler costing model.…”

“…• changes in design generation 6 , and changes in the engineering design see Grubler (2014), other than extra safety costs covered above.…”

A hopeless pursuit? National efforts to promote small modular nuclear reactors and revive nuclear power

“…SMR advocates counter with the argument that this can be compensated through savings from assembly line manufacture. There is good reason to be skeptical of the idea that learning from manufacturing many units will result in declining costs: in the United States and France, the two nations with the highest numbers of nuclear reactors, reactor construction costs have increased with experience (Boccard, 2014; Grubler, 2010, 2013; Hultman et al, 2007; Koomey & Hultman, 2007; Rangel & Lévêque, 2013). In other words, learning across the whole fleet, as measured by economic indicators, has been negative.…”

Energy innovation and the sustainability transition

“…In response to the criticism that TIS studies have typically relied on ex-post qualitative analysis of innovation system performance (Jacobsson and Bergek, 2011;Grubler, 2014) various indicator frameworks have been developed to quantitatively assess the performance of energy innovation systems have emerged (Hillman et al, 2011;Klitkou, Iversen and Borup, 2012;Borup et al, 2013;Wilson, 2014;Bento and Wilson, 2016;Hu, Skea and Hannon, 2017;Jacobsson, 2018a, 2018b).…”

“…The TIS framework has been applied to a wide range of energy related studies. These have examined the drivers and barriers associated with energy technologies such as wind power (Bergek and Jacobsson, 2003;Kamp, Smits and Andriesse, 2004;Gosens and Lu, 2013;Jacobsson and Karltorp, 2013;Reichardt et al, 2016;Hu, Skea and Hannon, 2017;Karltorp, Guo and Sandén, 2017), solar PV (Jacobsson, Sandén and Bangens, 2004;Dewald and Truffer, 2011;Quitzow, 2015), solar thermal (Nemet, 2014), biofuels (Hillman et al, 2008;Suurs and Hekkert, 2009;Meyer et al, 2014), biomass (Negro and Hekkert, 2008), combined heat and power (CHP) (Hekkert, Harmsen and de Jong, 2007;Hawkey, 2012), nuclear (Grubler, 2014) and marine energy (Vantoch-Wood, 2012;Corsatea, 2014;Andersson et al, 2017;Hannon, Van Diemen and Skea, 2017). We offer a detailed overview of one such study in Box 9.4.…”