nuclear-news

France has always been secretive about nuclear power costs

it is hard to say how successful the French were. The French national utility, Électricité de France, has never been open about what the plants cost to build.

A Nuclear Critic Draws a Lesson from France’s Success The New York Times January 19, 2010 By MATTHEW L. WALD

A new statistical analysis of an almost-secret topic — what it costs to build nuclear reactors in France — may have some lessons for a “nuclear renaissance” in the United States.

France, nuclear advocates often point out, gets about 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, or roughly quadruple the proportion that this country does…………

France, of course, built its reactors as matter of national policy, without regard to competition in the electric field; in the United States, most were built by private companies that worried about cost.

And it is hard to say how successful the French were. The French national utility, Électricité de France, has never been open about what the plants cost to build.

But a researcher at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna analyzed a 2000 report that included the French utility’s year-by-year expenses and correlated this to construction schedules. He concluded that construction cost at the end of the period was about 3.5 times higher than at the beginning, per unit of generating capacity.

A Nuclear Critic Draws a Lesson from France’s Success – Green Inc. Blog – NYTimes.com

January 20, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, France | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear secrecy