Impact of the Taxes on Used Nuclear Fuel on the Fuel Cycle Economics in Spain

Abstract

, that the choice between both is predicated on other than purely economic criteria.

Spent Nuclear Fuel Management: Levelized Cost of Electricity Generation and Analysis of Various Production Scenarios

“…As it is well-known [1][2][3][4][5], one of the most important back-end costs in the closed cycle comes from reprocessing, while in the case of the open cycle, it is the DGR; ergo, both of them have advantages and disadvantages. However, looking through various comparative studies of these strategies, where the economical aspect has been analyzed, they all conclude that the cost variation between the closed and open cycle is nearly 10%, as shown in the last economic analysis carried out by Moratilla [6].…”

“…For example, P. Högselius [8] explains that military ambitions and non-proliferation, technological culture, political culture and civil society, geological conditions and energy policy are the five main broad explanatory factors that are needed in order to analyze the differences in spent nuclear fuel policies between each country. Moreover, another important factor to consider is the tax policy of each country, as it has been explained for the Spanish scenario in different articles [6,9]. Analyzing the energy strategies of different countries, there are some of them, such as Sweden and Finland, that have assumed an open cycle strategy, having to construct deep geological repositories, whereas there are others that have decided to adopt the closed cycle, having to reprocess, recycle and, afterwards, vitrify and compact non-usable residue materials to be stored in the DGR.…”

A Review of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Strategies and the Spent Nuclear Fuel Management Technologies

“…Its main purpose is to reduce natural uranium needs, which with current technologies are estimated to decrease from about 8-12% [20,25] to 20-25% [29,34]. Moreover, an additional consequence is the reduction of pure Pu inventory and, thus, the proliferation risk.…”

“…The cost of the twice-through cycle is usually higher than for the oncethrough cycle. However, the magnitude of the difference between these costs depends on the methodology and the adopted hypothesis and assumptions [20,27,28,[31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40]. Figure 1 shows the evolution of the nuclear fuel cycle strategies costs with time, in mill/kWh, for different international studies [27,28,[30][31][32][33]38,40], which have been updated to 2016.…”

“…The cost of the twice-through cycle is usually higher than for the once-through cycle. However, the magnitude of the difference between these costs depends on the methodology and the adopted hypothesis and assumptions [20,27,28,[31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40].…”