Earth Equity News

A Nuclear Critic Draws a Lesson from France's Success. By Matthew L. Wald, NYTimes, January 19, 2010. "A new statistical analysis of an almost-secret topic -- what it costs to build nuclear reactors in France -- may have some lessons for a 'nuclear renaissance' in the United States. France, nuclear advocates often point out, gets about 80% of its electricity from nuclear power, or roughly quadruple the proportion that this country does... France, of course, built its reactors as matter of national policy, without regard to competition in the electric field; in the United States, most were built by private companies that worried about cost. And it is hard to say how successful the French were. The French national utility, Électricité de France, has never been open about what the plants cost to build. But a researcher at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna analyzed a 2000 report that included the French utility's year-by-year expenses and correlated this to construction schedules. He concluded [PDF, 36 pp] that construction cost at the end of the period was about 3.5 times higher than at the beginning,

"That caught the attention of Charles Komanoff, an energy analyst based in New York who began analyzing American power plant costs in the 1970s and is the author of a 1981 book [PDF, 335] comparing nuclear and coal plants of that era. Mr. Komanoff re-analyzed the data [PDF, 11pp], concentrating not only on the beginning and the end, but also the middle. He found that while costs rose over the period -- he put it at 60% -- they also fell for certain classes of reactors. One lesson, he said, was that 'building more plants in a short period of time creates a potential to reduce or at least control costs.' His findings echo what American utilities say, that building a 'first-of-a-kind' plant is expensive and later units are cheaper. But for Mr. Komanoff to reach a similar conclusion is significant, because he was a sharp critic of the industry in the construction boom of the 1980s and is no fan of nuclear power now... Putting a tax on carbon emissions, which might also spur nuclear construction, would be a smarter overall strategy than specifying nuclear plants, he said."