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The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing
Abstract
The paper reviews the history and the economics of the French PWR program, which is arguably the most successful nuclear-scale up experience in an industrialized country. Key to this success was a unique institutional framework that allowed for centralized decision making, a high degree of standardization, and regulatory stability, epitomized by comparatively short reactor construction times.Drawing on largely unknown public records, the paper reveals for the first time both absolute as well as yearly and specific reactor costs and their evolution over time. Its most significant finding is that even this most successful nuclear scale-up was characterized by a substantial escalation of real-term construction costs. Conversely, operating costs have remained remarkably flat, despite lowered load factors resulting from the need for load modulation in a system where base-load nuclear power plants supply three quarters of electricity.The French nuclear case illustrates the perils of the assumption of robust learning effects resulting in lowered costs over time in the scale-up of large-scale, complex new energy supply technologies. The uncertainties in anticipated learning effects of new technologies might be much larger that often assumed, including also cases of “negative learning” in which specific costs increase rather than decrease with accumulated experience.
... Mais, avec le recul, ces tensions semblaient alors se dérouler dans le cadre d'un jeu d'acteurs relativement classique, à l'intérieur d'une distribution des rôles claire, sous l'égide d'un État à la fois arbitre et stratège. La place centrale occupée par l'État dans les affaires nucléaires françaises a été mise en avant comme un facteur décisif de la réussite du programme électronucléaire : pour (Grubler, 2010), le nucléaire a mieux réussi en France qu'ailleurs (en particulier dans les nations décentralisées comme l'Allemagne ou les États-Unis) du fait, précisément, de la centralisation politique de la France et de sa tradition interventionniste, a priori adaptées à une industrie en besoin de stabilité, de continuité, de prévisibilité. Pour (Finon et Staropoli, 2001), « un fort appui politique, un monopole d'État sur l'électricité doté de ressources d'ingénierie substantielles, une industrie électromécanique hautement concentrée, une agence de R&D influente, opérant dans le cadre d'une grande stabilité de la régulation, et une coordination efficace, résultant d'arrangements organisationnels de long terme » étaient autant d'ingrédients à l'origine du succès du programme électronucléaire. ...
... La littérature est assez riche en articles et ouvrages qui analysent les coûts de construction de ces réacteurs 3 . Deux questions principales traversent ces études : 1) le 3. Citons notamment (Moynet, 1984 ;Parsons et Du, 2003 ;Koomey et Hultman, 2007 ;MIT, 2009 ;Grubler, 2010 ;Thomas, 2010 ;MIT, 2011 ;Hogue, 2012 ;Locatelli et Mancini, 2012 ;Duquesnoy, 2013 ;D'haeseleer, 2013 ;Berthélémy et Escobar, 2015 ;Escobar et Lévêque, 2015 ;Rothwell, 2015 ;Lovering et al., 2016Lovering et al., , 2017Koomey et al., 2017). ...
... Elles sont présentées en figure 3.3. Les chiffres des coûts donnés par la Cour, déflatés par le prix du PIB et assez proches de ceux analysés par Grubler (2010), dénotent un accroissement tendanciel des coûts (c'est la courbe en pointillés, tracée par la Cour) de l'ordre de 2 %/an. ...
Cet ouvrage expose les éléments économiques factuels, précis, complets et accessibles de l’énergie nucléaire afin de contribuer à un débat éclairé et dépassionné.Il présente, dans un premier temps, une analyse approfondie des politiques stratégiques relatives à l’énergie nucléaire en France et dans le monde. Puis, il traite de la formation des coûts de production de l’électricité nucléaire, que ce soit pour les réacteurs actuels ou du futur. Les aspects méthodologiques sont présentés de manière exhaustive et illustrés d’exemples et d’études de cas détaillés.Enfin, Économie de l’énergie nucléaire 1 propose une étude économique pertinente de la composante combustible de l’énergie nucléaire. Dans ce cadre, les aspects relatifs au marché de l’uranium sont présentés avant de décrire précisément les composantes techniques et économiques qui se trouvent en amont du cycle nucléaire.
... Whether this trend is reversible, is subject to debate: Drawing on the historic expansion of pressurized water reactors in France, Berthélemy and Escobar Rangel [16] suggest reinforced investments and standardization could lower construction costs and time. Grubler [17] however states that the expansion of pressurized water reactors never achieved positive learning effects in the first place. ...
... To assess the range of overnight construction costs, we reviewed different academic publications and industry reports providing 88 individual future projections or reported costs for different reactor concepts and countries [33,34,35,12,36,37,38,39,40,41,23,17,42,7,43,44,33,45,46,47]. We put a focus on light-water reactors (LWR), the most common reactor concept 1 , and OECD countries since [12] observes non-OECD estimates are not comparable. ...
... 2 Some literature suggests that historically, learning rates of 5 to 10% were achieved in the nuclear industy which would coincide with the mentioned projections [16,49,50]. However, the discrepancy between projected and actual costs is in line with previous analyses on the actual development of nuclear construction costs in Western countries since the 1970s [17,51,52,53,54], placing doubt on supposed learning rates. The right boxplot in Fig. 1 presents a similar image for construction time. ...
Many governments consider the construction of new nuclear power plants to support the decarbonization of the energy system. On the one hand, dispatchable nuclear plants can complement fluctuating generation from wind and solar, but on the other hand, escalating construction costs and times raise economic concerns. Using a detailed energy planning model, our analysis finds that even if, despite the historic trend, overnight construction costs of nuclear half to 4,000 US-$2018 per kW and construction times remain below 10 years, the cost efficient share of nuclear power in European electricity generation is only around 10%. This analysis still omits social costs of nuclear power, such as the risk of accidents or waste management. To recover their investment costs, nuclear plants must operate inflexibly and at utilization rates close to 90%. As a result, grid infrastructure, flexible demand, and storage are more efficient options to integrate fluctuating wind and PV generation.
... Some scholars have characterized this as "negative learning-by-doing." 1,2 This trend is often contrasted sharply with the steady downward trajectory of the cost of other electric generation technologies ("positive" learning-by-doing), particularly photovoltaic (PV) solar panels, wind turbines, and gas combustion turbines. 3 Budget overruns and schedule slippage in the construction of the AP1000 in the United States and the EPR in Europe indicate that the nuclear industry's economic woes have yet to be properly addressed. ...
... 10 However, outside the West, historic trajectories and recent results in NPP construction suggest that an upward cost trend is not inevitable and lower costs are possible, 11 although this interpretation and the credibility of the underlying data are disputed. 12,13 The present work wades into this fierce debate with two primary contributions: (1) novel, rich data on the design specifications of NPPs (see Appendix A), and (2) a quantitative analysis that connects the study of the nuclear industry to the literature of institutional political economy. ...
... But first I will briefly mention the prior works that collected and presented the necessary data on which subsequent analyses rely. These works have successively expanded data availability from the United States, 6,20 to France, 1,21 to several other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations, 11 and finally 82% a of the global population of reactors. 22 However, most of the foregoing works (with the exception of Ref. 21) do not analyze the underlying causal determinants of LT or OCC in a quantitative or systematic way. ...
Lead time—the duration of construction and commissioning—is an important determinant of the capital cost of nuclear power plants (NPPs). For an industry dominated by a handful of multinational firms, the degree of cross-national variation is surprising. NPP lead times have historically trended upward over time in Western nations, and yet they are comparatively quick and stable in East Asia. I theorize that the institutional capacity and autonomy of subnational governments can partially explain these patterns in the data. Having assembled a novel data set on the design specifications of the global population of NPPs, I empirically document a positive association between political decentralization and NPP lead time that is not explained by observed cross-country differences in NPP design. The results are suggestive of the hypothesis that political decentralization creates conditions that slow NPP construction for nontechnical reasons. However, the findings are not robust to certain robustness checks and fail to rule out the possibility that unobserved differences in design explain this association.
... By studying time series of overnight capital costs, studies in the first group have shown that nuclear costs in the US have increased before and after Three Mile Island, 15 cost trends differ across countries, 26,46 and construction costs have increased even in countries with comparatively short construction times. 47 Previous work has reported cost reductions when the same firm built multiple plants of the same model in France, 48 and stable costs in Japan between 1980 and 2011, owing among other factors to supportive national policies. 46 Overall, the majority of studies document construction cost increases and conclude that the nuclear experience has been one of limited or even negative cost-related learning. ...
... 46 Overall, the majority of studies document construction cost increases and conclude that the nuclear experience has been one of limited or even negative cost-related learning. 15,47,[49][50][51] Cost increases have been associated with reactor upscaling, a lack of technology standardization, fragmented industry structure and plant ownership, and increasing plant complexity including increases in the number of plant components, new control systems, redundancy in equipment, and added safety features. 17,47,52,53 Studies of cost escalation in mega-projects more broadly have found that nuclear power plant projects exhibit greater and more frequent cost overruns and delays compared to other electricity generation infrastructure, which has been linked to reduced modularity and more complex project governance compared to other technologies. ...
... 15,47,[49][50][51] Cost increases have been associated with reactor upscaling, a lack of technology standardization, fragmented industry structure and plant ownership, and increasing plant complexity including increases in the number of plant components, new control systems, redundancy in equipment, and added safety features. 17,47,52,53 Studies of cost escalation in mega-projects more broadly have found that nuclear power plant projects exhibit greater and more frequent cost overruns and delays compared to other electricity generation infrastructure, which has been linked to reduced modularity and more complex project governance compared to other technologies. 54,55 By developing engineering cost models of nuclear reactors and plants, studies have provided cost benchmarks for plant construction in the US 56-63 and other countries (e.g., Harris et al. 64 ). ...
2020 Elsevier Inc. Nuclear plant costs in the US have repeatedly exceeded projections. Here, we use data covering 5 decades and bottom-up cost modeling to identify the mechanisms behind this divergence. We observe that nth-of-a-kind plants have been more, not less, expensive than first-of-a-kind plants. “Soft” factors external to standardized reactor hardware, such as labor supervision, contributed over half of the cost rise from 1976 to 1987. Relatedly, containment building costs more than doubled from 1976 to 2017, due only in part to safety regulations. Labor productivity in recent plants is up to 13 times lower than industry expectations. Our results point to a gap between expected and realized costs stemming from low resilience to time- and site-dependent construction conditions. Prospective models suggest reducing commodity usage and automating construction to increase resilience. More generally, rethinking engineering design to relate design variables to cost change mechanisms could help deliver real-world cost reductions for technologies with demanding construction requirements. Nuclear power plants provide roughly half of the low-carbon electricity in the US. However, projections of nuclear plant costs have repeatedly failed to predict the cost overruns observed since the 1960s. We study the mechanisms that have contributed to the rise in nuclear construction costs over the past 5 decades to understand the divergence between expected and realized costs. We find that nth-of-a-kind plants in the US have been more expensive than first-of-a-kind plants, with “soft” factors external to reactor hardware contributing over half of the cost increase between 1976 and 1987. Costs of the reactor containment building more than doubled, primarily due to declining on-site labor productivity. Productivity in recent US plants is up to 13 times lower than industry expectations. A prospective analysis of the containment building suggests that improved materials and automation could increase the resilience of nuclear construction costs to variable conditions. We study nuclear plant costs in the US over the past 5 decades to understand the mechanisms that contributed to cost escalation and the repeated underestimation of construction cost. We show that declining labor productivity and “soft” costs were leading contributors. Counter to expectation, nth-of-a-kind plants have been more expensive than first-of-a-kind plants. Our prospective analysis of the containment building suggests that the cost resilience of nuclear construction could be increased through improved materials and automation.
... One place to see this uncertainty in action is to look at real world changes in technological performance as a function of experience-what many people call 'learning.' With a wry sense of humor, Arnulf has reminded us analysts that experience does not automatically generate learning nor even improvementwith his most striking reminder from his study, shown in figure 1, of the performance of French nuclear plants (Grübler 2010). Also shown on figure 1 is the learning curve for solar. ...
... Effective industrial policy requires building (and maintaining) institutions that are good at learning how to make decisions in the context of high levels (IRENA 2021(IRENA , 2022(IRENA , 2023, compiled by Greg Nemet and colleagues, and updated by these authors. French nuclear cost data are from Grübler (2010), converted to 2020 USD. French nuclear capacity data are from the World Nuclear Association (WNA 2023). ...
Even as most mainstream policy analysts support the idea of active industrial policy, important dissenting voices still question whether government intervention is possible without extreme waste. We suggest that many of today’s debates, which echo debates of the 1970s, need updating to reflect the reality that a lot has been learned about where and how government can pursue effective industrial policy. Central to effective industrial policy is the realization that the more transformative the goals the harder it is to know which policies, technologies and business models will work—and the greater the need for “experimental” approaches to policy that put uncertainty as the centerpiece.
... In contrast, the others require more site-specific adaptations for each project, making them more expensive. Also, nuclear energy has been widely analyzed (e.g., Berthélemy & Escobar Rangel, 2015;Escobar Rangel & Leveque, 2015;Grubler, 2010;Haas et al., 2019;Lang, 2017;Lovering et al., 2016), which will be further outlined in Section 3. Additional research is conducted on storage technologies such as batteries (e.g., Beuse et al., 2020;Matteson & Williams, 2015a, 2015bNykvist & Nilsson, 2015) and power-to-gas Böhm et al., 2019), as well as hydrogen production (Schoots et al., 2008) and fuel cells (Wei et al., 2017). Further, bioenergy systems (Junginger et al., 2006), the development of fossil fuel systems with carbon capture (Li et al., 2012), transition scenario to renewables (Handayani et al., 2019), and low-carbon power plants (Rubin, 2019) were analyzed. ...
... Regarding technological learning of nuclear power plants, Grubler (2010) is one of the most famous and widely recognized works, which provides a seminal contribution and a very comprehensive analysis of the nuclear power cost developments in France and the US. He was the first to compare the specific investment costs of nuclear power plants in France and the US in the period 1970-2000. ...
The concept of technological learning is a method to anticipate the future development of the costs of technologies. It has been discussed since the 1930s as a tool for determining manufacturing cost reductions, starting in an airplane manufacturing plant, by means of learning curves and has been widely used since the 2000s in energy models to endogenize technological change. In this paper, the theoretical concept of technological learning based on energy technologies is analyzed based on examples from the literature. The main low‐carbon power generation technologies, photovoltaics, concentrated solar power, wind and nuclear energy were analyzed, showing different cost trends. Additionally, the impact of policy support on technological learning was discussed in concrete examples of bioethanol and heat pumps. We find that the homogeneity and the modularity of a technology are essential for high learning rates. A good proof is the manufacturing cost development of photovoltaics in recent decades, where a rather stable learning rate of 20% has been identified. On the contrary, nuclear power did not evolve into a homogeneous technology due to required environmental adaptations caused by accidents and the lack of standardization and application of new engineering approaches. In that case, the overall price further increased. Finally, another important condition is stable legal and regulatory conditions regarding the implementation.
This article is categorized under: Policy and Economics > Green Economics and Financing
... As a contrast to offshore wind, nuclear power costs actually increased over the past decade, and at a faster rate than foreseen by any of the cost projection methods shown ( Figure 6). Reasons include their tendency to be "megaprojects" subject to cost overruns (Sovacool et al., 2014), lack of design standardisation, along with increases in reactor scale and complexity and fragmentation in industry Notes: Expert elicitation median (green line) and low-to-high range (green plume) for US values, from Abdulla et al. (2013); Engineering + Expert assessment mean (brown line) and low-to-high range (brown plume) for UK values, from LCICG (2013); Learning rate mean (blue line) and low-to-high range (blue plume) from Rubin et al. (2015) and Grubler (2010), combined with actual global deployment data from IEA (2020); Actual cost (grey line) refers to global unsubsidised costs from Lazard (2020) Tables 3 and 4 set out the factors used in each of the cost projection methods shown in Figures 5 and 6 respectively, highlighting the extent to which the insights from energy technology innovation systems analysis were brought to bear on these cost projections. In both technology cases there was little recourse to the detailed elements of the TIS in either the expert elicitations or combined assessments, whilst the (single factor) learning curve extrapolations by definition only account for the cumulative deployment of each technology. ...
... TIS factors accounted for Learning curve extrapolation (using learning rates from Rubin et al. 2015 andGrubler 2010) None explicitly, though a single factor learning curve accounts for deployment-related factors (e.g. learning-by-doing, industry scale) implicitly. ...
Making informed estimates of future energy technology costs is central to understanding the cost of the low-carbon transition. A number of methods have been used to make such estimates: extrapolating empirically derived learning rates; use of expert elicitations; and engineering assessments which analyse future developments for technology components' cost and performance parameters. In addition, there is a rich literature on different energy technology innovation systems analysis frameworks, which identify and analyse the many processes that drive technologies' development, including those that make them increasingly cost-competitive and commercially ready. However, there is a surprising lack of linkage between the fields of technology cost projections and technology innovation systems analysis. There is a clear opportunity to better relate these two fields, such that the detailed processes included in technology innovation systems frameworks can be fully considered when estimating future energy technology costs. Here we demonstrate how this can be done. We identify that learning curve, expert elicitation and engineering assessment methods already either implicitly or explicitly incorporate some elements of technology innovation systems frameworks, most commonly those relating to R&D and deployment-related drivers. Yet they could more explicitly encompass a broader range of innovation processes. For example, future cost developments could be considered in light of the extent to which there is a well-functioning energy technological innovation system (TIS), including support for the direction of technology research, industry experimentation and development, market formation including by demand-pull policies and technology legitimation. We suggest that failure to fully encompass such processes may have contributed to overestimates of nuclear cost reductions and under-estimates of offshore wind cost reductions in the last decade.
... The key arguments for the faster growth of granular technologies are better access to investment capital, as well as faster experience accumulation leading to faster learning and cost decline [18]. While the costs of solar and wind have been declining much faster than the costs of nuclear did [4,72] we find that renewables still grow slower than nuclear in the 1980s. This finding not only supports the argument in the literature [23,26,27,[73][74][75][76][77] that costs are not the single factor driving the growth of policy-driven and socially-embedded technologies, but it goes further by quantitatively demonstrating that more expensive technologies can in fact grow faster. ...
Climate change mitigation requires rapid expansion of low-carbon electricity but there is a disagreement on whether available technologies such as renewables and nuclear power can be scaled up sufficiently fast. Here we analyse the diffusion of nuclear (from the 1960s), as well as wind and solar (from the 1980-90s) power at the national level. We show that all these technologies have been adopted in most large economies except major energy exporters, but solar and wind diffused across countries faster and wider than nuclear. After the initial adoption, the maximum annual growth for nuclear power has been 2.6% of total electricity supply (IQR 1.3%-6%), for wind – 1.1% (0.6%-1.7%), and for solar – 0.8% (0.5%-1.3%). The fastest growth of nuclear power occurred in Western Europe in the 1980s, a response by industrialised democracies to the energy supply crises of the 1970s. The European Union, currently experiencing a similar energy supply shock, is planning to expand wind and solar at similarly high rates. This illustrates that national contexts can impact the speed of technology diffusion at least as much as technology characteristics like cost, granularity, and complexity. In the IPCC climate change mitigation pathways, renewables grow much faster than nuclear due to their lower projected costs, though empirical evidence does not show that the cost is the sole factor determining the speed of diffusion. We demonstrate that expanding low-carbon electricity in line with the 1.5°C target in Asia requires some growth of nuclear power even if renewables increase similarly to the most ambitious European Union’s plans, and that 2°C-consistent pathways in Asia are compatible with replicating China’s nuclear power plans to the whole region, while also replicating the projected near-term growth of renewables in the EU. Our analysis demonstrates the usefulness of empirically-benchmarked feasibility spaces for context-sensitive future technology projections.
... With 56 NPPs in operation and 1 NPP under construction [19], France, the United Kingdom, and Finland represent the countries in Europe that are building NPPs on their territories. In France, the nuclear industry is a national reference and exports its technology to the rest of the world [73]. Likewise, nuclear energy in the country accounts for 70% of the energy generated; therefore, it will continue to bet on the long-term operation of its NPPs in operation [74]. ...
In the current situation of global energy transition, nuclear energy maintains its reputation as a stable power generation technology, without dependence on other resources and without CO2 emissions. However, one of the main problems with its use is the management of the radioactive waste it generates, which has given rise to different international strategies: (i) reprocessing; (ii) storage; and (iii) disposal. Given the interest generated by nuclear energy in recent times and the need to manage the waste generated, this paper presents a global review of the different international nuclear waste management strategies, using a scientific method based on (i) a bibliometric review of the scientific publications related to nuclear waste management and (ii) an analysis of the technical aspects of the different international management strategies. The effective and safe management of nuclear waste will contribute to the advancement of international nuclear energy development strategies that encourage the construction of new nuclear power plants and the lifetime extension of existing ones.
... None of these projected consequences is inevitable. Learning is difficult to sustain in complex technologies like nuclear power (Grubler 2010). Domestic content requirements for mature mass-produced technologies like solar PV and lithium-ion batteries may slow learning in these fields if domestic producers are unable to draw on knowledge held by foreign producers, particularly in China (Helveston et al 2022). ...
This Perspective sketches how recent legislation in the United States may impact the domestic and global energy and climate innovation systems, drawing on systems concepts articulated by Arnulf Grubler (1998). It also sets out risks and gaps that could lead to less favorable outcomes.
... Technologies exhibit a range of cost trajectories 1-3 from the rapidly falling costs of integrated circuits and photovoltaic (PV) systems 4,5 to the rising costs of nuclear power plants 6,7 . Across technologies, cost declines are often slowed by 'soft costs', the costs of processes and services that are needed to design and deploy hardware. ...
Technology hardware and deployment processes (‘soft technology’) seem fundamentally different, but little work examines the nature of this difference and its implications for technology improvement. Here we present a model to study the roles of hardware and soft technology in cost evolution and apply it to solar photovoltaic (PV) systems. Differing properties of hardware and soft technology help explain PV’s cost decline. Rapid improvements in hardware affected globally traded components that lowered both hardware and soft costs. Improvements in soft technology occurred more slowly, were not shared as readily across locations and only affected soft costs, ultimately contributing less than previously estimated. As a result, initial differences in soft technology across countries persisted and the share of soft costs rose. In general, we show the usefulness of modelling dependencies between technology costs and features to understand past drivers of cost change and inform future technology development.
... Its consultations were substantially shaped by the impression of the oil crisis, which led it to recommend a de-coupling of energy supply from external sources and imports towards a stable and secure energy production within the national borders (Finon & Staropoli, 2001). This policy programme entailing an orientation towards nuclear energy is frequently viewed as a vision to guide the policy sector, developed by the central institutions of French nuclear energy policymaking (CEA, EDF, Ministry of Industry) (Grubler, 2010). ...
... We implement the technology learning effect for combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) with a learning rate of 15%, nuclear power (-1%), onshore wind power (17%), offshore wind power (9%), solar PV (34%), waste incineration, biomass and biogas (11%). A negative learning rate is set for nuclear power since empirical research repeatedly shows that the costs for nuclear power plants have an increasing trend despite growing cumulative installed capacity [51,55]. The learning effect is not applied to coal and lignite-fired power plants since they frequently show stable trends since the 1980s [56] and generally cannot be considered as a new emerging technology in our model timeframe. ...
Bottom-up, technology-rich electricity system models are commonly used to generate scenarios for policy support at a national or global level. In literature, previous hindcasting studies (also called retrospective modeling or ex-post modeling) evaluated existing models rather than sought to inform model development from the beginning. In this study, we present a hindcasting exercise with D-EXPANSE model for national electricity systems in 31 European countries over the 1990-2019 period. We develop several model versions with or without elastic electricity demand and with or without endogenous technology learning, and use hindcasting to choose the most accurate configuration of the bottom-up model. The hindcasting results show that a model with endogenous elastic demand can capture well the real-world evolution of electricity demand, if elasticity factor is chosen well and if the countries did not undergo severe structural changes. Endogenous technology learning, however, increases the uptake of new emerging technologies in cost-optimal scenarios, but still cannot fully capture the real-world dynamics and at times even introduces further inaccuracies.
... As a result, nuclear power grew from 4% of national electricity supply in 1970 to 10% in 1978 and almost 40% by 1982. As Grubler has noted, "the reasons for this success lay in a unique institutional setting allowing centralized decision-making, regulatory stability, dedicated efforts for standardized reactor designs and a powerful nationalized utility, EDF, whose substantial in-house engineering resources enabled it to act as principal and agent of reactor construction simultaneously [118]". ...
The 21st Conference of the Parties (CoP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) shifted the nature of the political economy challenge associated with achieving a global emissions trajectory that is consistent with a climate. The shifts generated by CoP21 place country decision-making and country policies at centre stage. Under moderately optimistic assumptions concerning the vigour with which CoP21 objectives are pursued, nearly every country in the world will set about to design and implement the most promising and locally relevant policies for achieving their agreed contribution to global mitigation. These policies are virtually certain to vary dramatically across countries. In short, the world stands at the cusp of an unprecedented era of policy experimentation in driving a clean energy transition. This book steps into this new world of broad-scale and locally relevant policy experimentation. The chapters focus on the political economy of clean energy transition with an emphasis on specific issues encountered in both developed and developing countries. Lead authors contribute a broad diversity of experience drawn from all major regions of the world, representing a compendium of what has been learned from recent initiatives, mostly (but not exclusively) at country level, to reduce GHG emissions. As this new era of experimentation dawns, their contributions are both relevant and timely.
... However, external stakeholders are still unable to transparently understand the assumptions on economies of scale and potential synergies. In the past, especially for the construction of NPPs, the nuclear industry has failed to deliver on such promises (Koomey and Hultman 2007;Grubler 2010). Finally, we can also see signs of access to waste disposal having feedback effects on the nuclear industry (for example, regarding new builds and current operation). ...
... Both review studies commonly show that the learning rates of solar PV are the largest (8-47%) while those of nuclear power are the lowest, with ample evidence of negative learning (− 25-6%). For instance, the cost escalation of nuclear power with the cumulative installation was commonly observed in the early-adopting countries [21,22]. The learning rates on coal, CCGT, and onshore wind generally show modest learning rates compared to the solar PV, with few studies also showing negative learning rates. ...
Like many countries responding to climate change, Korea also faces an unprecedented transformation of its
power sector into a low-carbon system. To evaluate the most advantageous combination of technologies and
necessary policies for achieving the goals of such a transformation, this study decomposes the historical
development of the total cost of five major power technologies in Korea into three cost components and identifies
the underlying driving forces and variabilities of each. We then project the likely distribution of costs in 2030
using Monte-Carlo simulation and simulate the possible impact of climate and environmental policies on the
economic landscape of competing technologies. Our results show that the business-as-usual dynamics of key
techno-economic-market factors are not likely to secure the economic viability of the proposed energy transition
in Korea. Introducing carbon prices or strict environmental policy is imperative in Korea to make renewables and
less carbon-intensive gas power remain cost-competitive with coal power.
... The share of nuclear power in electricity generation declined from 17.5% of the global electricity generation in 1995 to slightly less than 10% in 2021 [106,107]. Budget overruns of nuclear power plants in recent years, but also decades-long substantial negative learning rates [108,109] have made investors sceptical, making it challenging to augment capital [110]. The share of newly added nuclear power capacity in total added power capacity in the world has become very low for the last ten years [111]. ...
This study presents a novel energy system modelling approach for the analysis and comparison of global energy transition pathways for the decarbonisation of the electricity sector. The results of the International Energy Agency (IEA), and the Teske/DLR scenarios are each reproduced. Additionally, five new energy transition tra-jectories, called LUT, are presented. The research examines the feasibility of each scenario across nine major regions in 5-year intervals, from 2015 to 2050, under a uniform modelling environment with identical technical and financial assumptions. The main differences between the energy transition paths are identified across: (1) the average electricity generation costs; (2) energy diversity; (3) system flexibility; (4) energy security; and, (5) transition dynamics. All LUT and Teske/DLR scenarios are transitioned to zero CO2 emissions and a 100% renewable energy system by 2050 at the latest. Results reveal that the LUT scenarios are the least-cost pathways, while the Teske/DLR scenarios are centred around energy diversity with slightly higher LCOE of around 10-20%. The IEA shares similarities with the Teske/DLR scenarios in terms of energy diversity yet depends on the continued use of fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage, and nuclear power. The IEA scenario based on current governmental policies presents a worst-case situation regarding CO2 emissions reduction, climate change and overall system costs.
... These reactors are much smaller than Third Generation reactors and are designed to be modular in nature in order to reduce capital costs through learning-by-doing. Existing nuclear reactor sizes have broadly increased over time to benefit from economies of scale [47], as smaller reactors need similar investments in safety systems as large reactors. While HTGRs are designed with inherent safety features, it is not clear that they could be operated safely without a similar range of safety systems. ...
Swift and deep decarbonisation of electricity generation is central to enabling a timely transition to net-zero emission energy systems. While future power systems will likely be dominated by variable renewable energy (VRE) sources, studies have identified a need for low-carbon dispatchable power such as nuclear. We use a cost-optimising power system model to examine the technoeconomic case for investment in new nuclear capacity in the UK's net-zero emissions energy system and consider four sensitivity dimensions: the capital cost of new nuclear, the availability of competing technologies, the expansion of interconnection and weather conditions. We conclude that new nuclear capacity is only cost-effective if ambitious cost and construction times are assumed, competing technologies are unavailable and interconnector expansion is not permitted. We find that bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) and long-term storage could reduce electricity system costs by 5–21% and that synchronous condensers can provide cost-effective inertia in highly renewable systems with low amounts of synchronous generation. We show that a nearly 100% variable renewable system with very little fossil fuels, no new build nuclear and facilitated by long-term storage is the most cost-effective system design. This suggests that the current favourable UK Government policy towards nuclear is becoming increasingly difficult to justify.
... Nuclear energy increased from 4% in 1970 to 10% of the national electric supply in 1978; it was almost 40% in 1982. According to Grubler (2010), the reasons for this success can be aligned as follows: the presence of a perfect institutional environment that allows for centralized decision-making; standardized reactor design; regulatory stability; in-house engineering resources; and a strong nationalized utility company that allows them to act as the main representative of reactor construction. ...
Over the years, the global energy demand has been rising exponentially with an increasing population. Considering this, catering to the aforementioned needs has been one of the major challenges of the current era. Moreover, the release of harmful greenhouse gas emissions from the energy-producing industries has also been severely polluting the environment and contributing to global warming. Hence, to meet the energy demand, it is important that the production and distribution losses in the energy cycle are minimized, and innovative environment-friendly systems get developed. This can only be achieved effectively by the constant digitalization of the energy sector. Taking into account the adaptation of digitalization in the energy sector, this chapter highlights the importance of digitalization in the energy sector, reviews the current digitalization trends being followed by stakeholders around the world, and explains the digitalization technologies being currently deployed to accomplish data-driven decision-making in alignment to their impact. It further addresses the concerns and challenges of digitalization and ultimately discusses the future of digitalization in the energy sector. This work will enable the researchers and practitioners to learn about the current dynamics of digitalization being followed across the globe and what needs to be done to ensure the sustainability of the energy sector.
... Within, it struggled to gain legitimacy and credibility in relation to more groundbreaking innovations -the longstanding hopes for Generation IV and nuclear fusion, and the recent promise of small modular reactors. Outsider critics, in turn, asked why the EPR would escape the 'more of the same' trap of negative learning curves observed in the past (Grubler 2010), and the long legacy of opacity in the nuclear sector, not least on economics. The in-between nature of the EPR also hampered the requalification efforts entailed in the FOAK argument: Why would prototypes at multiple sites be needed, if indeed the design represented merely an incremental improvement, the critics asked. ...
Technological innovation needs construction of promises and expectations to mobilise resources and supportive networks, yet exaggerated promises risk leading to disappointment and undermining this very support. Drawing on an analysis of secondary literature and press articles, the concepts of hype cycle and Regimes of Economics of Techno-scientific Promises (ETP) are applied to examine the construction of the largely failed promise of the European Pressurised Reactor (EPR), designed to spearhead a French-led ‘nuclear renaissance’ in the 1990s. The debates on the EPR economics in France and the UK illustrate the country-specific features that condition the ability of an incremental in-between innovation, in an archetypically 'modernist' field of technology, to survive in today's 'presentist' era of shrinking timeframes. The phase of disillusionment depicted in the hype cycle can better be described as two country-specific processes whereby the initial promise was continuously modified and requalified in order to maintain its legitimacy and credibility. As an incremental innovation, the EPR continues to struggle between the contrasting needs of demonstrating radical novelty and experience-based continuity. This tension is accentuated by the country-specific legacies and imaginaries, including the historically shaped ideological trust in the state and the market.
... Although now particularly visible in 'liberalised' energy markets (Thomas 2010), these challenges are nothing new. Indeed, whether it is the French state-financed programmes of the 1970s or 1980s or more liberalised trends between 2010-2020, a 'negative learning curve' shows even incremental nuclear designs tend to get more expensive over time (Grubler 2010). ...
Nuclear power has long offered an iconic context for addressing risk and controversy surrounding megaprojects-including trends towards cost overruns, management failures, governance challenges , and accountability breaches. Less attention has focused on reasons why countries continue new nuclear construction despite these well-documented problems. Whilst other analysis tends to frame associated issues in terms of energy provision, this paper will explore how civil nuclear infrastructures subsist within wider 'infrastructure ecologies'-encompassing ostensibly discrete meg-aprojects across both civil and military nuclear sectors. Attending closely to the UK case, we show how understandings of megapro-jects can move beyond bounded sectoral and time horizons to include infrastructure patterns and rhythms that transcend the usual academic and policy silos. By illuminating strong military-related drivers modulating civil nuclear 'infrastructure rhythms' in the UK, key issues arise concerning bounded notions of a 'megaproject' in this context-for instance in how costs are calculated around what seems a far more deeply and broadly integrated 'nuclear complex'. Major undeclared interdependencies between civilian and military nuclear activities raise significant implications for policymaking and wider democracy. ARTICLE HISTORY
... Data on capital expenditure on nuclear energy are rather homogenous and potentially go back several decades, as the world's first nuclear power plant to produce usable electricity through atomic fission was built in the early 1950s. Despite this, up until a few years ago, the literature on the construction costs of nuclear power reactors looked solely to the development between 1970 and the end of the 1980s in the costs of construction in two countries (France and the United States), leaving out about three quarters of reactors built globally between 1960 and 2010 (see for example Grubler, 2010, andBerthélemy andEscobar-Rangel, 2015). More recently, data has been produced to map historical reactorspecific overnight construction cost (OCC) data covering the full cost history for existing reactors in the Canada, France, Germany, Japan, India, South Korea and the United States, encompassing about two-thirds of all reactors built globally (Lovering, Yip and Nordhaus, 2016). ...
Is there a trade-off between spending on the green economy and an economy's strength? This paper addresses this question by estimating output multipliers for spending in clean energy and biodiversity conservation, and by comparing these to multipliers of spending on non-ecofriendly energy and land use activities. Using a new international dataset, we arrive at two key results. First, we find that every dollar spent on key carbon-neutral or carbon-sink activities can generate more than a dollar's worth of economic activity, whereas non-green spending returns less than a dollar. Second, for categories of spending where formal comparisons are possible, like renewable versus fossil fuel energy, we find that multipliers on green spending are about twice as large as their non-green counterparts. The point estimates of the multipliers are 1.1–1.7 for renewable energy investment and 0.4–0.7 for fossil fuel energy investment, depending on horizon and specification. These findings survive several robustness checks and lend support to bottom-up analyses that find that stabilizing climate and reversing biodiversity loss go hand in hand with economic prosperity.
... 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, 2010Grubler, , 2013Hultman et al., 2007;Rangel & Lévêque, 2013). In other words, learning across the whole fleet, as measured by economic indicators, has been negative. ...
Nuclear power plant construction has historically been challenged by problems of high cost, cost escalation, and construction delays. The newest set of large reactor projects have also been overbudget and overtime. This has prompted interest in new reactor technologies that proponents claim would not suffer these problems, specifically small modular reactors (SMRs), a class that encompasses a wide range of technologies. This article examines national efforts in three countries, Canada, the UK, and the United States, which are pursuing SMRs vigorously and where the government has funded their development generously. We compare the different strategies and foci of these national strategies, analyzing the various forms of support offered by the separate agencies of the government, and the private companies that are trying to develop SMRs. We also offer an overview of the different types of reactor technologies being pursued in these different countries. Following these, we outline the main challenge confronting SMR technologies: their ability to generate electricity in an economically competitive manner, highlighting the problems resulting from economies of scale being lost. By examining the experience so far, we find that even designs based on well‐tested technology cannot be deployed till after 2030 and the more radical designs might never be.
This article is categorized under: Policy and Economics > Research and Development
Policy and Economics > Regional and International Strategies
Energy and Power Systems > Energy Infrastructure
... Data on capital expenditure on nuclear energy are rather homogenous and potentially go back several decades, as the world's first nuclear power plant to produce usable electricity through atomic fission was built in the early 1950s. Despite this, up until a few years ago, the literature on the construction costs of nuclear power reactors looked solely to the development between 1970 and the end of the 1980s in the costs of construction in two countries (France and the United States), leaving out about three quarters of reactors built globally between 1960 and 2010 (see for example Grubler, 2010, andBerthélemy andEscobar Rangel, 2015). More recently, data has been produced to map historical reactor-specific overnight construction cost (OCC) data covering the full cost history for existing reactors in the Canada, France, Germany, Japan, India, South Korea and the United States, encompassing about twothirds of all reactors built globally (Lovering et al., 2016). ...
Is there a trade-off between spending on the green economy and an economy's strength? This paper addresses this question by estimating output multipliers for spending in clean energy and biodiversity conservation, and by comparing these to multipliers of spending on non-ecofriendly energy and land use activities. Using a new international dataset, we arrive at two key results. First, we find that every dollar spent on key carbon-neutral or carbon-sink activities can generate more than a dollar's worth of economic activity, whereas non-green spending returns less than a dollar. Second, for categories of spending where formal comparisons are possible, like renewable versus fossil fuel energy, we find that multipliers on green spending are about twice as large as their non-green counterparts. The point estimates of the multipliers are 1.1–1.7 for renewable energy investment and 0.4–0.7 for fossil fuel energy investment, depending on horizon and specification. These findings survive several robustness checks and lend support to bottom-up analyses that find that stabilizing climate and reversing biodiversity loss go hand in hand with economic prosperity.
... On the other side, nuclear power shows signs of stagnation and decline globally 25 and there is a debate of whether its costs decrease overtime. 26,27 To assess socio-technical feasibility of future expansion of nuclear power in Korea, we compare projected growth rates in each of the scenarios with the rates observed in Korea historically. This approach builds on the idea that historical realities are a reflection of the aggregate of causal mechanisms that will also shape the future. ...
Decarbonisation of the power sector requires feasible strategies for rapid phase-out of fossil fuels and expansion of low-carbon sources. This study develops and uses a model with an explicit account of power plant stocks to explore plausible decarbonization scenarios of the power sector in the Republic of Korea through 2050 and 2060. The results show that achieving zero emissions from the power sector by the mid-century requires either ambitious expansion of renewables backed by gas-fired generation equipped with carbon capture and storage or significant expansion of nuclear power. The first strategy implies replicating and maintaining for decades maximum growth rates of solar power achieved in leading countries and becoming an early and ambitious adopter of the CCS technology. The alternative expansion of nuclear power has historical precedents in Korea and other countries but may not be acceptable in the current political and regulatory environment.
... 60-80% of NP's levelized cost are capital costs (Haas et al. 2019b). Since the 1970s capital costs in the USA and France are escalating (Koomey and Hultman 2007;Grubler 2010). Lovering et al. (2016) fabricated a hypothesis about NP becoming competitive by technology diffusion, economies of scale, and positive learning. ...
... From the first experimental reactors at Marcoule, construction of which began in 1955, to the 1990s, when the share of nuclear electricity stabilized in the mix around three-quarters of the electricity production, France has achieved in less than 40 years one of the fastest and most important energy transitions in European history [66]. In order to lead this transition, French governments have relied on massive political and financial State investment. ...
This perspective aims at a geopolitical conceptual and empirical contribution to research questions on power in energy transition research, coming from the history of energy and Sustainability Transitions Studies. It aims at answering the call that has been made for the development of approaches that take power dynamics between actors into account, by authors coming from Sustainability Transitions Studies.
This article suggests a geopolitical approach of power relations, at and of the different scales of energy transitions – understood as a change of energy resource could open a complementary and more spatial vision on this issue based on the main concepts of representations, territoriality, and resource development.
This conceptual proposition is then developed over two empirical examples. The first one is France’s energy governance system, which is just stepping out of its precedent energy transition towards nuclear energy. It explores the effects of the ongoing sustainable transition on the structure of the political landscape and of the energy sector using the concepts of resource development control and appropriation. The second one on EU energy transition policy highlights the importance of representations, a key concept in geopolitics, whose analysis facilitates the understanding of actors’ strategies.
... Adverse experiences with first projects of any given design will lead to even more hesitancy, which will further reduce learning opportunities. Experience with cost developments under this strategy is mixed: costs trends rose almost uniformly in the US, but remained largely stable in France (see Grubler (2010) and Escobar-Rangle and Leveque (2015) for nuance) and, more recently, in Japan, China, and South Korea (Buongiorno et al., 2018). Berthélemy and Escobar Rangel (2015) credit design standardization and stable architect-engineer teams with successes in preventing cost escalations and enabling modest temporary cost reductions in the French program. ...
In recent years, there has been an intense public debate about whether and, if so, to what extent investments in nuclear energy should be part of strategies to mitigate climate change. Here we address this question from an ethical perspective, evaluating different strategies of energy system development in terms of three ethical criteria, which will differentially appeal to proponents of different normative ethical frameworks. Starting from a standard analysis of climate change as arising from an intergenerational collective action problem, we evaluate whether contributions from nuclear energy to future zero-emissions energy systems can be expected to increase the economic competitiveness and technical feasibility of such systems when compared with fossil fuel-based ones. For many socio-economic and geographic contexts, our review of the energy system modelling literature suggests the answer to this question is “yes”. We conclude that, from the point of view of climate change mitigation, investments in nuclear energy as part of a broader energy portfolio will be ethically required in these contexts to minimize the risks of decarbonization failure, and thus the tail risks of catastrophic global warming. Finally, we consider which other aspects of nuclear energy deployment, apart from climate change, have the potential to overturn the ultimate ethical verdict on investments in nuclear energy. We suggest that considerations of its possible effects -- whether beneficial or adverse -- on the proliferation of nuclear weapons are the most plausible candidates.
... A l'échelle nationale, le processus de transition énergétique approprié par une diversité d'acteurs bouscule des équilibres hérités des systèmes énergétiques en place. En France par exemple, la transition vers l'énergie nucléaire, opérée de la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale aux années 1990 (de 0% à 70% de la production énergétique française), s'est appuyée sur un investissement politique et financier massif de l'Etat ainsi que sur de grands acteurs industriels et de recherche centralisés (Brucher, 1994;Grubler, 2010). La dynamique de transition actuelle, fondée sur l'utilisation d'énergies renouvelables, et dont on peut considérer qu'elle débute dans les années 2000, dix ans après la fin de la transition électrique vers le nucléaire, prend par certaines de ces orientations (décentralisation de la production de ressources, production locale ou individuelle, etc.) le contre-pied des logiques de la transition précédente vers le nucléaire, avec des effets attendus sur les relations de pouvoirs entre acteurs. ...
The energy transition policy conducted by the European institutions is in line with the previous policies of integration and liberalization of the energy sector initiated in the 1990s. Because it is thought in coherence with these policies, it postulates in principle that this transition policy must take place on a European scale. This article questions this presupposition by analyzing both European energy legislation and the discourse built around it. It compares the constructions and representations of alternative scales for this transition, carried by other actors. This diversity of scales of representation and territorialization of the energy transition opens up a more geopolitical questioning on the modification of the territorial balance of power by this new use of resources, which generates issues of appropriation, access and control.
... These reactors are much smaller than Third Generation reactors and are designed to be modular in nature in order to reduce capital costs through learning-by-doing. Existing nuclear reactor sizes have broadly increased over time to benefit from economies of scale (Grubler, 2010), as smaller reactors need similar investments in safety systems as large reactors. While HTGRs are designed with inherent safety features, it is not clear that they could be operated safely without a similar range of safety systems. ...
Swift and deep decarbonisation of electricity generation is central to enabling a timely transition to net-zero emission energy systems. While future power systems will likely be dominated by variable renewables (VRE), studies have identified a need for low-carbon dispatchable power such as nuclear. We use a cost-optimising power system model to examine the technoeconomic case for investment in new nuclear capacity in the UK's net-zero emissions energy system and consider four sensitivity dimensions: the capital cost of new nuclear, the availability of competing technologies, the expansion of interconnection and weather conditions. We conclude that new nuclear capacity is only cost-effective if technologies such as BECCS and long-term storage are assumed unavailable. These technologies add flexibility and could reduce electricity system costs by 8-17%. Interconnector expansion further reduces the need for new nuclear and synchronous condensers can provide cost-effective inertia in highly renewable systems with low amounts of synchronous generation. We show that a nearly 100% variable renewable system with very little fossil fuels, no new build nuclear and facilitated by long-term storage is the most cost-effective system design. This suggests that the current favourable UK Government policy towards nuclear is becoming increasingly difficult to justify.
... Up to now, it is not clear if and when those factors show saturation followed by a decline, eventually aligning with the optimistic expectations. Nuclear technology is an example for a continued increase in investment costs with time due to growing complexity (Grubler et al. 2010). It can be concluded that it is necessary to also explore less optimistic scenarios to understand the impact on IAM results in different policy scenarios. ...
Integrated Assessment Models of Global Climate Change are an established tool to explore possible pathways of climate change mitigation and adaptation. The models are a quantitative backbone for IPCC reports. But can the models be trusted? This manuscript discusses how the models can be scrutinized and where limits to model validation exist.
... The study included detailed analyses of the two projects using ATLAS coding of qualitative data to identify collaborations, network management, procurement, etc. An earlier study revealed that scaling up nuclear power led to significant increases in cost and time [8]. Subsequent work by Locatelli predicted the completion of Flamanville for 2019-2020 [9], and associates the delays to a lack of standardization. ...
Construction time and time overruns for infrastructure projects have been frequently studied; however, the construction time of power plants has not been studied. This lack of study is problematic, as more renewable energy power plants, such as wind and solar, are planned for many jurisdictions. Accurately estimating the construction time of a power plant will assist construction planning, budget estimates, and policy development encouraging the use of more renewable sources. The construction times of utility scale power plants in Canada were studied using publicly available data. Multiple linear regression analysis techniques were applied to the data to generate construction time estimation functions for all power plants together, and for individual technologies. The analyses reveal that construction time is sensitive to jurisdiction and the decade of construction, indicating that decisions made by individual Canadian provincial governments at different times had statistically significant impacts on construction time. The analyses also indicated that construction time is a strong function of installed capacity, independent of technology. This finding suggests that large solar or wind energy facilities will encounter longer construction times similar to large hydroelectric facilities.
... This low number of patents possibly can be explained by nuclear energy being a mature technology with fewer opportunities for developing novel and breakthrough technologies, except certain advanced nuclear technologies. In addition, Grübler [64] shows that the complexity of nuclear technologies (e.g., pressurized water reactors) hinders learning-by-doing, thus innovative capacity is relatively low. The wide gap between patenting in the top three technology fields (e.g., renewable energy, sustainable transport, and energy efficiency) and the other three technology fields (e.g., nuclear energy, CCS, and smart grid) (see Fig. 1), might be explained by feed-in-tariffs to encourage renewable energy use and purchase incentives to boost sales of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles. ...
To foster the development, multiple sources of uncertainty associated with benefits and costs of innovation portfolios from low carbon investment need to be considered. We apply Modern Portfolio Theory to construct efficient portfolios of different low-carbon technology fields. The empirical framework is applied to four countries (i.e., Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, and France) for six low-carbon technology fields (i.e., renewable energy, smart grid, energy efficiency, sustainable transport, carbon capture and storage, and nuclear power) categorized based on priority areas of the EU's 2008 Strategic Energy Technology Plan. The four main findings are: (1) the highest priority technology fields with the minimum risk portfolio are nuclear power in Germany, renewable energy in the United Kingdom, and energy efficiency in Italy and France, (2) the highest priority technology field with the maximum risk portfolio is sustainable transport in Germany, the United Kingdom, and France, and smart grid in Italy, (3) sustainable transport declines in priority as risk decreases in the portfolios of Germany, the United Kingdom, and France, while smart grid declines in priority as risk decreases in the portfolio in Italy, and (4) the presence of negative correlations over time among expected Return on Investments across energy technology fields improves using the Modern Portfolio Theory framework as risk diversification strategy. Our analysis provides efficient portfolios of low-carbon technologies, which can help shape the overall strategy and coordinate each country's comparative advantage by proposing new laws and policies, monitoring existing ones, and managing budget.
... Along similar lines, for elicitations, under-or overestimation of technological change can occur if experts cannot foresee increases or decreases in policy support, deployment, or regulation for this particular set of technologies. As previous research suggests, it is also not surprising to see nuclear Comparing expert elicitation and model-based probabilistic technology cost forecasts for the energy transition evolve differently (52,77,78) from other technologies. In other words, this faster pace of innovation in most of the energy technologies covered compared to the forecasts is likely the result of structural change across the energy sector due to widespread policies and social and market forces. ...
Significance
Forecasting is essential to design efforts to address climate change. We conduct a systematic comparison of probabilistic technology cost forecasts produced by expert elicitation and model-based methods. We assess their performance by generating probabilistic cost forecasts of energy technologies rooted at various years in the past and then comparing these with observed costs in 2019. Model-based methods outperformed expert elicitations both in terms of capturing 2019 observed values and producing forecast medians that were closer to the observed values. However, all methods underestimated technological progress in almost all technologies. We also produce 2030 cost forecasts and find that elicitations generally yield narrower uncertainty ranges than model-based methods and that model-based forecasts are lower for more modular technologies.
... For example, very slow growth, which often is seen in very large systems is not conducive to learning. 32,33,94,95 It is, however, possible that in this case one is confounding effects of size, with effects of timescale. In any event, given the urgency of climate change, our concerns are not so much with an excessively slow introduction of DAC systems, but excessively fast ones. ...
Decarbonising the power sector requires feasible strategies for the rapid phase-out of fossil fuels and the expansion of low-carbon sources. This study assesses the feasibility of plausible decarbonisation scenarios for the power sector in the Republic of Korea through 2050 and 2060. Our power plant stock accounting model results show that achieving zero emissions from the power sector by the mid-century requires either an ambitious expansion of renewables backed by gas-fired generation equipped with carbon capture and storage or a significant increase of nuclear power. The first strategy implies replicating and maintaining for decades the maximum growth rates of solar power achieved in leading countries and becoming an early and ambitious adopter of the carbon capture and storage technology. The alternative expansion of nuclear power has historical precedents in Korea and other countries but may not be acceptable in the current political and regulatory environment. Hence, our analysis shows that the potential hurdles for decarbonisation in the power sector in Korea are formidable but manageable and should be overcome over the coming years, which gives hope to other similar countries.
The changing socio-economic context has a crucial impact in nuclear decisions and execution of the projects. The nuclear projects initiated over the past 20 years reduced their construction times relative to those initiated before. Of the over 600 the nuclear projects built over the past 70 years only 3% took longer than 15 years to complete. Analysing the lengthiest projects within their economic context, reveals that ‘when and where’, (i.e., the contextual risks) explains most the delays, thus questioning whether nuclear power plant projects are inherently examples of the megaproject ‘pathologies.’ The analysis of the lengthiest nuclear power projects makes evident that the failure to deliver nuclear plants on time and within budget was related to the historical period and/or the specific location more than to any inherent characteristics of nuclear power plants. Stakeholders of nuclear projects (and megaprojects in general) should be attentive to socio-economic changes and macro-economic impacts to avoid pitfalls.
The global demand for energy is booming day by day and yet the energy is required to be clean due to the strict environmental regulations. The current carbon-based economy primarily relies on energy extracted from fossil fuels. However, burning fossil fuels results in the emission of greenhouse gases and other pollutants that are deadly to the environment. The hydrogen economy is proposed as an alternative to fossil fuels, considering the high energy density by weight of hydrogen as well as its environmentally friendly nature. This modern economy depends on green hydrogen as commercial fuel and it is considered the vital energy conversion and storage strategy to fully exploit the benefits of renewable and sustainable energy resources, for example, solar and wind energies. Hydrogen energy-related technologies (production, storage, conversion, etc.) present new research frontiers. Moreover, hydrogen combined with fuel cells provides essential energy solutions for the 21st century. Fuel cells utilize hydrogen gaseous fuel to generate electricity via an electrochemical process that provides much higher efficiencies and zero pollutant output than the conventional energy conversion technologies, for example, an internal combustion engine. In addition, the reversible fuel cells utilizing renewable energies provide the most efficient water electrolysis and they are being rapidly developed for green hydrogen production. Thus, hydrogen and fuel cells present promising potential for replacing conventional energy conversion systems with clean energy systems. This chapter briefly reviews the current research status of the hydrogen and fuel cell technologies for a viable supply and storage of clean and economical energy. The various challenges hampering the massive commercialization of hydrogen and fuel cell technologies are also identified and discussed. In addition, the market and policy trends regarding hydrogen and fuel cells are discussed.
Foreign assistance was decisive in the formation of the teams in charge of nuclear science, technology and industry in Spain. France played a key role from the end of World War Two, assisting Spanish expertise in all stages of the uranium cycle, from mining to disposal. In this paper, after examining the configuration of the French nuclear complex and the start of French-Spanish cooperation, we will focus on the training of Spanish nuclear personnel, in both the scientific-technical and the industrial side. We will try to prove the importance of France in the whole Western nuclear assistance, and also that, though France was unable to supplant the United States, it was able to grab significant projects and influence in Spain. In the end, nuclear learning proved to be a cumulative and mutual (not symmetrical) process, which far exceeded the temporal, geographical and sectorial limits initially marked out.
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KCPEEUS7SQQKIZNIRAF4/full?target=10.1080/07341512.2022.2076402
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster has rekindled the world's attention to nuclear safety following the devastating nuclear accidents that occurred in the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. As China continues to expand in nuclear power development, how it views and responds to nuclear safety carries significant implications on its nuclear safety and security in the future. This paper examines the Chinese authorities' response to nuclear safety pre- and post-Fukushima, based on (1) a longitudinal big-data discourse analysis of the Chinese newspaper articles published during the period 2008–2017, and (2) an in-depth comprehensive review of nuclear safety performance and safety governance based on credential and publicly available documents and websites, both locally and internationally. Our assessment reveals that (i) China's concerns over nuclear safety and accident surged immediately following the Fukushima crisis. Increasing attention towards nuclear emergency response has been observed since 2014, (ii) China has displayed strengths in reactor design and safety operation, and (iii) its safety governance has been constrained by institutional fragmentation, inadequate transparency, inadequate safety professionals, lack of a strong safety culture, amid its ongoing plans to increase nuclear capacity three-fold by 2050. To improve nuclear safety, China may further strengthen its safety standards, safety management and monitoring, improve institutional arrangements, increase the ratio of safety professionals, intensify its safety culture and transparency, develop process-based safety regulations, and champion international collaboration to keep itself abreast of the latest international best practices.
Decarbonisation of the power sector requires feasible strategies for rapid phase-out of fossil fuels and expansion of low-carbon sources. This study develops and uses a model with an explicit account of power plant stocks to explore plausible decarbonization scenarios of the power sector in the Republic of Korea through 2050 and 2060. The results show that achieving zero emissions from the power sector by the mid-century requires either ambitious expansion of renewables backed by gas-fired generation equipped with carbon capture and storage or significant expansion of nuclear power. The first strategy implies replicating and maintaining for decades maximum growth rates of solar power achieved in leading countries and becoming an early and ambitious adopter of the CCS technology. The alternative expansion of nuclear power has historical precedents in Korea and other countries but may not be acceptable in the current political and regulatory environment.
Understanding the role of technology characteristics and the context in the diffusion of new energy technologies is important for assessing feasibility of climate mitigation. We examine the historical adoption of nuclear power as a case of a complex large scale energy technology. We conduct an event history analysis of grid connections of first sizable commercial nuclear power reactors in 79 countries between 1950 and 2018. We show that the introduction of nuclear power can largely be explained by contextual variables such as the proximity of a country to a major technology supplier (‘ease of diffusion’), the size of the economy, electricity demand growth, and energy import dependence (‘market attractiveness’). The lack of nuclear newcomers in the early 1990s can be explained by the lack of countries with high growth in electricity demand and sufficient capacities to build their first nuclear power plant, either on their own or with international help. We also find that nuclear accidents, the pursuit of nuclear weapons, and the advances made in competing technologies played only a minor role in nuclear technology failing to be established in more countries. Our analysis improves understanding of the feasibility of introducing contested and expensive technologies in a heterogenous world with motivations and capacities that differ across countries and by a patchwork of international relations. While countries with high state capacity or support from a major technology supplier are capable of introducing large-scale technologies quickly, technology diffusion to other regions might undergo significant delays due to lower motivations and capacities.
Human development and climate change mitigation are related, and infrastructure - buildings and engineered constructions - is essential to jointly achieve these objectives. Infrastructure provide services that meet societal needs, but this provision is currently insufficient and CO2 emissions intensive in the use and construction. However, infrastructure dynamics is subject to technical, economic and institutional constraints. In this thesis, I investigate how the evolution of global infrastructure stocks can reconcile development needs with CO2 emissions reduction. I focus on three points of tension: (i) carbon lock-in - the inertia on future emissions reduction - induced by short-term development, (ii) limited financing for investment, and (iii) the carbon space for sufficient basic infrastructure development. This thesis makes a contribution by highlighting some of the conditions that need to be met if infrastructure is not to limit the feasibility of climate-development reconciliation.In the first chapter, I systematic review the literature on infrastructure-induced carbon lock-in. I use a supervised machine learning approach to select relevant articles. I synthesize according to sectors and geographical areas the existing quantifications of carbon lock-in, the indicators used to measure it and qualitative statements mentioning policy implications to get out of it. I show that coal-fired power plants contribute significantly to global carbon lock-in and are exposed to the risk of stranded assets due to early retirement. The sectoral distribution and amount of stranded assets differ between countries, with significant amounts for buildings sector in developed countries. Stranded assets are reduced if climate policies are implemented quickly. There is a need to ensure the legitimacy and long-term stability of these policies and coordination between infrastructure sectors. Carbon pricing should not be the only instrument used and should be complemented by regulation and financial support for the deployment of low-carbon capital.In the second chapter, I quantify the investment needs in transportation infrastructures in relation to different levels of climate ambitions. I build socio-economic scenarios with an integrated assessment model that explicitly represents the transport sector. I develop a module to quantify investment needs in line with future mobility trends. I apply a global sensitivity analysis to identify the determinants of investment needs. I show that investment needs decrease with increasing climate ambition but represent significant amounts compared to historical levels and needs in other sectors. Rail utilization level and road building costs are determining factors and could be levers to be activated to promote low-carbon pathways with reduced costs.In the third chapter, I assess whether a high level of access to five essential services - electricity, water, shelter, sanitation and transport - can be provided globally without compromising climate mitigation goals. I quantify in each country the needs for cement and steel based on historical trends. I then estimate the CO2 emissions associated with the manufacture of these materials by taking into account influencing factors such as production technologies, international trade patterns and mitigation actions in these industries. I show that providing high access to sanitation and transport can conflict with the existing low-carbon trajectories. These results suggest the need to limit the use of cement and steel and for further efforts to reduce emissions in developed countries.
We quantify the impacts of renewable deployment on carbon emissions and natural gas supply in the Saudi power sector. A capacity expansion model, which simultaneously considers generation and transmission builds covering a planning horizon up to 2040, was created. The simulated scenarios, which entailed retiring liquid fuels from the Saudi power sector and accounted for different gas prices, consider the following candidate build technologies: nuclear, gas, solar photovoltaics, wind, concentrated solar power with storage, and battery storage. Renewables can reduce carbon emissions by 66 million tons to 114 million tons (25–41 %) by 2040 depending on the gas price. The abatement costs were estimated to range between 20 $/ton and 50 $/ton of carbon dioxide. Within Saudi Arabia, renewable deployment can also defer national gas supply expansion plans but not investments in expanding domestic gas transport capacities. Finally, under certain conditions when deploying significant renewable capacity, better transmission interconnection between regions manages renewable intermittency more cost-effectively than storage deployment.
11.1 Introduction Changes in products, devices, processes, and practices—that is, changes in technology—largely determine the development and consequences of industrial society. Historical evidence (e.g., Freeman 1989; Mokyr 1990; Maddison 1991; Grübler 1998) and economic theory (Tinbergen 1942; Solow 1957; Denison 1962, 1985; Griliches 1996) confirm that advances in technological knowledge are the single most important contributing factor to long-term productivity and economic growth. Technology is also central to the long-term evolution of the environment and to development problems now on policy agendas worldwide under the general rubric, "global change." Although technology is central, technological change is typically the least satisfactory aspect of global change modeling. Each of the fac-tors that determine the wide range of projected emissions of, say, carbon dioxide (CO 2)—such as the future level of economic activity (largely driven by advances in productivity), the energy required for each unit of economic output, and the carbon emitted for each unit of energy consumed—is a function of technology. This also applies to the technological linkages in any kind of macro or sectoral production function (Abramovitz 1993). Consequently, technology largely ac-counts for the wide range seen in published long-term carbon emission estimates. A recent review of the literature (Nakicenovic et al. 1998b) indicates an emis-sions range spanning from 2 GtC (gigatons, 10 15 grams, of elemental carbon) to well above 40 GtC by 2100. This wide span is largely explained by differences in technology-related assumptions such as macroeconomic productivity growth, en-ergy intensities, and availability and costs of low-and zero-carbon technological alternatives. In this chapter we outline a model of endogenous technological change that is applied to the energy sector and the CO 2 emissions problem. Like any model, it is an abstraction of our understanding of how "the system works." Therefore, we begin by outlining a number of stylized abstractions from our review of the 280 Arnulf Grübler and Andrii Gritsevskyi 281 theoretical and empirical literature (Section 11.2). We emphasize in particular that, like all knowledge, improved technological knowledge can exhibit increas-ing returns. These are, however, highly uncertain, resulting in diverse innova-tion strategies reflecting different technological "expectations" (Rosenberg 1996) by a multitude of actors. Adopting the term "innovation" in the Schumpeterian sense means that all innovative activity is essentially economic, that is, technol-ogy arises from "within" (Schumpeter 1934) the economy and society at large. Innovation is costly, requiring up-front expenditures in improving technological knowledge in its disembodied form [typically research and development (R&D)] and in its embodied form (plants and equipment). This leads to the formulation of a multi-actor, multiregion model of uncertain increasing returns to technological innovation. In this model, innovation costs include both R&D and expenditures on physical plants and equipment that lead to improvements via learning by doing and learning by using. The basic elements of the model and its most salient pa-rameterizations and input assumptions are outlined in Section 11.3 in a nonmath-ematical way. Section 11.4 presents some illustrative quantitative model results, exploring in particular changes in patterns of technology diffusion and carbon emissions under alternative assumptions concerning uncertainty about resource availability and costs, energy demand, technology characteristics, and the exis-tence of uncertain environmental limits that are examined in both the absence and the presence of uncertain increasing returns phenomena. Conclusions are pre-sented in Section 11.5, highlighting in particular the implications for analytical "next steps" toward the challenge of a deeper theoretical and empirical under-standing of the mechanisms and incentives driving technological change.
France is the only country in the world ever to operate a commercial scale (1,200 MWe) sodium cooled, plutonium fuelled fast breeder reactor, the Superphénix at Creys-Malville. However, the French fast breeder reactor program turned out to be too costly and could never compete with light water reactor technology. Numerous technical prob-lems, low uranium prices and massive opposition exacerbated the poor economic and operational performance of the fast breeder reactor. Superphénix only operated about half of the time that it was officially connected to the grid and was shut down in 1998 with a lifetime load factor of less than 7%. The Superphénix predecessor, Phénix at Marcoule, which began operating in 1973 and will be shut down later in 2009, has experienced numerous sodium leaks and fires and a series of potentially serious reactivity incidents. The lifetime load factor of ap-proximately 45% is one of the lowest in the world. France's program to produce and separate plutonium started right after the Second World War. While the initial purpose was to obtain plutonium for the nuclear weapons program, very early on, the fast breeder reactor became a second strategic goal. European cooperation was another goal and the EURO-CHEMIC consortium was created in 1957 with the participation of 10 countries of which France and Germany held the largest shares with 17% each. 1 The first reprocessing plant, the "plutonium factory" (usine de plutonium) UP1 was started up in Marcoule in 1958 and the first proposal for the experi-mental fast reactor Rapsodie was drawn up that year. Preliminary studies for a 1000-MWe reactor were carried out as early as 1964. Materials were tested for their behavior under neutron irradiation in Har-monie starting in 1965 and breeder core configuration issues in the critical facility, Masurca, starting in 1966.
The last two decades have seen a remarkable growth in the number of cooperative agreements among large, multinational enterprises (MNE). Why, and under what conditions, would these vertically and horizontally integrated organizations choose to give up a part of what has often been cited as their main raison d’être, i.e., secure control over firm-specific technical and market information, in favor of sharing such information with rivals?
This book is an interpretation of how the nuclear dream which emerged at the end of World War II and seemed to be on the verge of realization in the aftermath of the 1973 OPEC embargo dissolved during the ensuing four years. The central argument is that the origin of this disappointment can be found in circumstances that span the preceding 25-odd year period. Much of the first third of the book reviews events and developments of the 1950s and 1960s to answer the question of how American light water reactor technology overwhelmed the Western world market for nuclear power plants. The authors believe that the answer to this question contains the key to understanding the real condition of nuclear power today. To compress their argument into its most concise form: the way that the innovation process for light water reactors was managed by business and government in the US and Western Europe contributed to the identification of nuclear power technology with something that many citizens in these countries dislike and distrust about their societies. Moreover, it is this dislike and distrust which is the driving force behind the nuclear safety controversy and the principal cause for the dissolution of the nuclear dream. The authors conclude that it seems increasingly likely that the US, at least, will have to forego nuclear energy as a major source of power for the remainder of the century.
This paper discusses performance in the French nuclear industry, which is, especially in comparative perspective, a significant success. It emphasizes the interaction and co-evolution of institutions, organizational patterns and the technological regime in the industry. As deregulation in the electricity industry is spreading across the industrialized countries, the success of the French nuclear sector limits the scope for liberalization in France - a situation that is likely to keep France on this technological trajectory for power generation. The paper concludes by assessing the sustainability of the system thus generated.
Nuclear power, perhaps more than any other industrial technology, is a child of state interests. Whether peaceful or war like, use of atomic power has traditionally been identified with the larger imperatives of state security. Furthermore, the exploitation of nuclear power has required the foundation of complex state apparatuses to operate, regulate and justify it. In this paper, the examples of the USA, France and Sweden are used and comparisons made between their different histories of state involvement in nuclear power development. The discussion is shaped by drawing similarities between the behaviour of states and that of characters in the Prometheus myth — gods, Titans and mortals.
We present a reactor-by-reactor analysis of historical busbar costs for 99 nuclear reactors in the United States, and compare those costs with recent projections for next-generation US reactors. We argue that cost projections far different from median historical costs require more justification than estimates that lie close to those medians. Our analysis suggests that some recent projections of capital costs, construction duration, and total operations and maintenance costs are quite low—far enough from the historical medians that additional scrutiny may be required to justify using such estimates in current policy discussions and planning.
This paper presents a new method for modeling-induced technological learning and uncertainty in energy systems. Three related features are introduced simultaneously: (1) increasing returns to scale for the costs of new technologies; (2) clusters of linked technologies that induce learning depending on their technological 'proximity' in addition to the technology relations through the structure (and connections) of the energy system; and (3) uncertain costs of all technologies and energy sources. The energy systems-engineering model MESSAGE developed at IIASA was modified to include these three new features. MESSAGE is a linear programming optimization model.
This article discusses the current efforts to measure disability in a comparable manner internationally, the effects of using different types of wording in questions, and the implications of the approach of asking about 'difficulties' rather than 'disability' on the use of disability statistics.
The study design was qualitative. Twenty-one focus groups were run with adults responding for themselves. Nine groups were classified a priori by the author as 'disabled', six as 'unsure', and the last six as 'non-disabled'. The participants completed a questionnaire using the Washington Group on Disability Statistics (WG) Short Set, the South African Census 2001 question, and the question 'Are you disabled?'. This was followed by group discussion on these questions and on how the concept of disability is understood by group participants.
Participants understand disability as being a permanent, unchangeable state, mostly physical, and where a person is unable to do anything. The participants in the three groups of allocated disability status (disabled, unsure and non-disabled) provided quite different responses on the three questions. All participants in the 'disabled' and 'unsure' groups reported having 'difficulty' on the WG questions, but the 'unsure' groups did not identify as being 'disabled' on either of the two other questions.
Using questions that ask about 'difficulty' rather than 'disability' provides a more comprehensive and inclusive measure of disability with a clearer understanding of what is being measured. Asking about 'difficulty' provides an improved measure of disability status for effective data collection and analysis to promote development, implementation and monitoring of disability-inclusive policies.
Large increases in productivity are typically realized as organizations gain experience in production. These "learning curves"
have been found in many organizations. Organizations vary considerably in the rates at which they learn. Some organizations
show remarkable productivity gains, whereas others show little or no learning. Reasons for the variation observed in organizational
learning curves include organizational "forgetting," employee turnover, transfer of knowledge from other products and other
organizations, and economies of scale.
This paper describes the endogenous technical change module that has been incorporated in POLES and the main quantitative results of the new version of the model and corresponding exercises. Section 2 presents the methodology that has been used in order to assess the returns to R&D for the main power generation technologies identified in the model. R&D budget allocation is then analysed for the base case in Section 3, which also illustrates the differences in the behaviour, respectively of the least and most risk-averse agents. Section 4, analyses in detail the changes in budget allocation that are induced by the introduction of CO 2 emission constraints to 2030, as well as their impacts on marginal and total abatement costs for the main world regions. As a last step, the consequences of changes in public R&D are examined in Section 5. This exercise shows that the performance and diffusion of the technologies benefiting from the shift in public R&D are largely improved, in spite of noticeable "crowding out" effects - of private research by public research - for these technologies.
"Nowhere does history indulge in repetitions so often or so uniformly as in Wall Street," observed legendary speculator Jesse Livermore. History tells us that periods of major technological innovation are typically accompanied by speculative bubbles as economic agents overreact to genuine advancements in productivity. Excessive run-ups in asset prices can have important consequences for the economy as firms and investors respond to the price signals, resulting in capital misallocation. On the one hand, speculation can magnify the volatility of economic and financial variables, thus harming the welfare of those who are averse to uncertainty and fluctuations. But on the other hand, speculation can increase investment in risky ventures, thus yielding benefits to a society that suffers from an underinvestment problem.
A number of factors, including design variation and the combination of uncertain costs and cost-plus contracting, diminished opportunities and incentives to improve power plant design and construction over the last several decades. This paper incorporates these factors into a model of learning that relies on a principal-agent framework. The author finds that, because of design variation, learning was reduced when an agent contracted with a series of different principals; agent learning declined when cost uncertainty increased during the late 1970s and 1980s; and, at the same time, the locus of learning may have shifted from agents to principals. Copyright 1996 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
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