Speaker
Description
Between the 1960s and early 1980s, the United States undertook the world’s largest nuclear power construction program. Early projects benefited from declining construction costs, making nuclear power economically competitive with fossil alternatives. From the early 1970s and onward, however, overnight construction costs (OCC) escalated rapidly, coinciding with regulatory tightening, high inflation and interest rates, and increasing project size and complexity. This cost escalation ultimately ended the U.S. nuclear build-out and has since been extensively studied. Most existing analyses focus on construction costs alone, leaving unresolved the question of whether nuclear investments were economically successful over their full operating lifetimes.
This paper addresses that gap by evaluating the historical economics of the U.S. nuclear fleet using lifetime performance metrics rather than construction costs alone. By combining reactor-specific OCC data with detailed operational, fuel, and financial data, the study reconstructs Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) and Net Present Value (NPV) for U.S. nuclear reactors over their initial operating lifetimes.
Fuel costs are estimated using a physics-based model of the uranium fuel cycle calibrated to historical reported fuel cost reporting, while O&M costs are reconstructed using plant-specific data supplemented by fleet-level benchmarks.
The results contribute a long-missing perspective to nuclear cost studies by evaluating whether the U.S. nuclear build-out was economically successful when judged on realized lifetime performance rather than construction outcomes alone. The findings offer empirical insights for current nuclear investment debates, particularly regarding optimal reactor size, project complexity, and the economic lessons relevant for future nuclear deployment.