Ahari Hashemi - Nuclear Research Centre, AEOI

The economics of electricity generation are important. If the financial cost of building and operating the plant cannot profitably be recouped by selling the electricity, it is not economically viable. But as energy itself can be a more fundamental unit of accounting than money, it is also essential to know which generating systems produce the best return on the energy invested in them. As well as energy costs, there are external costs to be considered, those environmental and health consequences of energy production which do not appear in the financial accounts. Recent studies have plausibly quantified them in financial terms, and I will comment on those at the end. Many energy analysis studies done in the 1970s seem to have assumed that a rapid expansion of nuclear generating capacity would lead to a temporary net energy deficit in an overall system sense. However, this requires dynamic analysis of whole systems, and is not considered here. Studies were also driven by a perception that primary energy sources including uranium would become increasingly difficult and expensive to recover, and would thus require undue amounts of energy to access them. In this study, nuclear power shows up very well as a net provider of energy, and with centrifuge enrichment is closely comparable.

Cost – Benefit, Economic, Nuclear Energy, Environment