Revisiting the cost escalation curse of nuclear power. New lessons from the French experience

摘要

Since the completion of the first wave of nuclear reactors in 1970, to the ongoing constructionof Generation III+ reactors in Finland and France, nuclear power seems to be doomed to acost escalation curse. For the U.S, this phenomena has been widely studied due to the huge costdierence between the first and last reactor built. It is often argued that the heterogeneity in thenuclear fleet did not allow to achieve learning eects. In turn, the French nuclear power programfollowed a standardization strategy and it was developed within a centralized institutionalsetting. However, previous cost assessments also found for France a substantial increase in thecapital costs. This finding led to conclude that even with the best economic conditions, the costescalation is inherent to nuclear power.In this paper we reexamine the main drivers of cost escalation for France, using the actualconstruction costs from the Cour des Comptes report. By using this new information, we foundthat the cost escalation of previous studies (based on estimations), was less than it was argued.Our results indicate that it is undeniable that the scale-up ended up in more costly reactors butwe also found evidence of a learning curve within the same size and type of reactors. This findingdemostrates that the standardization strategy adopted in the French nuclear power programallowed to achieve significant cost reductions.