Minimising the economic cost and risk to accelerator-driven subcritical reactor technology: The case of designing for flexibility: Part 1

Steer, Steven J.; Cardin, Michel-Alexandre; Nuttall, William J.; Parks, Geoffrey T.; Gonçalves, Leonardo V.N.

doi:10.1016/j.nucengdes.2011.11.027

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Besides, other studies have focused on valuing alternative reactor technologies that could help improving the economic performance of a nuclear system. Cardin et al (2012) considered a first-of-a-kind commercial thoriumfuelled Accelerator-Driven Subcritical Reactor as a safer alternative for nuclear power generation. Jain et al (2013b) focused on small-and medium-sized reactors (SMRs) and investigated the economic impact of modular construction of such reactors.…”

Section: Capacity Deployment Of Nuclear Facilitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Strategic real option and flexibility analysis for nuclear power plants considering uncertainty in electricity demand and public acceptance

2017

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Nuclear power is an important energy source especially in consideration of CO2 emissions and global warming. Deploying nuclear power plants, however, may be challenging when uncertainty in long-term electricity demand and more importantly public acceptance are considered. This is true especially for emerging economies (e.g., India, China) concerned with reducing their carbon footprint in the context of growing economic development, while accommodating a growing population and significantly changing demographics, as well as recent events that may affect the public's perception of nuclear technology. In the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, public acceptance has come to play a central role in continued operations and deployment of new nuclear power systems worldwide. In countries seeing important long-term demographic changes, it may be difficult to determine the future capacity needed, when and where to deploy it over time, and in the most economic manner. Existing studies on capacity deployment typically do not consider such uncertainty drivers in long-term capacity deployment analyses (e.g., 40+ years). To address these issues, this paper introduces a novel approach to nuclear power systems design and capacity deployment under uncertainty that exploits the idea of strategic flexibility and managerial decision rules. The approach enables dealing more pro-actively with uncertainty and helps identify the most economic deployment paths for new nuclear capacity deployment over multiple sites. One novelty of the study lies in the explicit recognition of public acceptance as an important uncertainty driver affecting economic performance, along with long-term electricity demand. Another novelty is in how the concept of flexibility is exploited to deal with uncertainty and improve expected lifecycle performance (e.g. cost). New design and deployment strategies are developed and analyzed through a multistage stochastic programming framework where decision rules are represented as non-anticipative constraints. This approach provides a new way to devise and analyze adaptation strategies in view of long-term uncertainty fluctuations that is more intuitive and readily usable by system operators than typical solutions obtained from standard real options analysis techniques, which are typically used to analyze flexibility in large-scale, irreversible investment projects. The study considers three flexibility strategies subject to uncertainty in electricity demand and public acceptance: 1) phasing (or staging) capacity deployment over time and space, 2) onsite capacity expansion, and 3) life extension. Numerical analysis shows that flexible designs perform better than rigid optimal design deployment strategies, and the most flexible design combining the above strategies outperforms both more rigid and less flexible design alternatives. It is also demonstrated that a flexible design benefits from the strategies of phasing and capacity expansion most significantly across all three strategies studied. The results provide...

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Section: Capacity Deployment Of Nuclear Facilitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…3 illustrates some outcomes of the GBM process generated for the out-of-sample analysis. The costs and generation assumptions are adapted from the paper by Steer et al (2012) and Jin et al (2011), and are detailed in the supplementary material. Several figures are valid as of 2006, and are converted from British pounds to US dollars.…”

Section: Numerical Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Strategic real option and flexibility analysis for nuclear power plants considering uncertainty in electricity demand and public acceptance

2017

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View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Existing accelerators of this kind are primarily based at research facilities and have not been specifically designed or budgeted for very high reliability [28]. Nevertheless, as a percentage of scheduled operational time, mature high-power proton accelerator facilities can achieve availabilities of around 85-90% [13].…”

Section: Accelerator Reliabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%