Economic Risk Analysis

Purpose

An important aspect to ensure that advanced reactor development continues at the rate it is currently at is ensuring the economics of developing advanced reactors remains at a sufficiently low level of risk.

Scope

When evaluating the economic risk of developing the advanced reactor, reactor vendors and plant operators will want to consider cost associated with licensing, construction, commissioning, and operation of a reactor. It is important that costs associated with these categories do not go above a reasonable level.

Economic Risk Analysis

From the perspective of the advanced reactor community, particularly for reactor vendors and plant operators, managing enterprise risk is needed to ensure profitable economics, particularly through the licensing, construction, commissioning, and operational phases with different dynamics than large projects such as those involved in the current commercial nuclear reactor fleet. Achieving on-time, on-budget construction with successful high-capacity operation of the plant after commissioning, especially for the initial plant deployments, is considered to be essential to achieve widespread acceptance and adoption of advanced reactors. Recently, EPRI has initiated general research in Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) to help address this issue. The initial results of this research are reported in [53].

Advanced reactors will be expected to achieve production and economic performance that are economically competitive with other sources of electricity production and that meet established requirements for reliability and availability. In particular, advanced plants will need to operate with very high levels of safety and economic performance from the time of initial commercial deployment (i.e., for widespread adoption of advanced reactors there will likely not be tolerance for a substantial learning curve to achieve the required performance objectives). This condition will require a much broader, comprehensive, and integrated approach to risk management than currently is employed for the fleet of operating reactors. As an example, some advanced reactor designs have provisions to address accidents; however, while their actuation would prevent core damage and any radioactive impacts to the public, their actuation also would result in the likely loss of the plant as an economic asset.