Update on the Cost of Nuclear Power

Yangbo Du and John E. Parsons

Working Papers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research

Abstract: We update the cost of nuclear power as calculated in the MIT (2003) Future of Nuclear Power study. Our main focus is on the changing cost of construction of new plants. The MIT (2003) study provided useful data on the cost of then recent builds in Japan and the Republic of Korea. We provide similar data on later builds in Japan and the Republic of Korea as well as a careful analysis of the forecasted costs on some recently proposed plants in the US. Using the updated cost of construction, we calculate a levelized cost of electricity from nuclear power. We also update the cost of electricity from coal- and gas-fired power plants and compare the levelized costs of nuclear, coal and gas. The results show that the cost of constructing a nuclear plant have approximately doubled. The cost of constructing coal-fired plants has also increased, although perhaps just as importantly, the cost of the coal itself spiked dramatically, too. Capital costs are a much smaller fraction of the cost of electricity from gas, so it is the recent spike in the price of natural gas that have contributed to the increased cost of electricity. These results document changing prices leading up to the current economic and financial crisis, and do not incorporate how this crisis may be currently affecting prices.

Date: 2009-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://tisiphone.mit.edu/RePEc/mee/wpaper/2009-004.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to tisiphone.mit.edu:80 (No such host is known. )
http://tisiphone.mit.edu/RePEc/mee/wpaper/DuandPar ... ostofnuclear0905.xls (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to tisiphone.mit.edu:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mee:wpaper:0904

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sharmila Ganguly ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).