The role of the reactor size for an investment in the nuclear sector: An evaluation of not-financial parameters

The literature presents many studies about the economics of new Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs). Such studies are based on Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) methods encompassing the accounts related to Construction, Operation & Maintenance, Fuel and Decommissioning. However the investment evaluation of a nuclear reactor should also include not-financial factors such as siting and grid constraints, impact on the national industrial system, etc.The Integrated model for the Competitiveness Assessment of SMRs (INCAS), developed by Politecnico di Milano cooperating with the IAEA, is designed to analyze the choice of the better Nuclear Power Plant size as a multidimensional problem. In particular the INCAS’s module “External Factors” evaluates the impact of the factors that are not considered in the traditional DCF methods.This paper presents a list of these factors, providing, for each one, the rationale and the quantification procedure; then each factor is quantified for the Italian case. The IRIS reactor has been chosen as SMR representative.The approach and the framework of the model can be applied to worldwide countries while the specific results apply to most of the European countries. The results show that SMRs have better performances than LRs with respect to the external factors, in general and in the Italian scenario in particular.