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energy center. It can be seen from the nuclear power growth patterns for Cases 6L and
8L, shown in Figs. D-2i and D-2j, that the energy support ratio for Case 8L is higher.
D-7
The degraded neutronics of the FBRs fueled with Pu-Th are reflected in the U308 utilization
of Case 8L where the ore usage per GWe is almost 50% higher than for Case 6L (see Fig.
0-2h).
However, for most years the total amount of energy that is available to be built
in the energy centers is about the same for Case 8L as it is for Case 6L because the
total amount of nuclear energy is lower.
Key selected results from the nuclear-fossil competition calculations are presented
in Tables D-3 and D-4 for high-cost and intermediate-cost U,08 supplies respectively.
Each table presents the cumulative capacity of nuclear and fossil plants built through
year 2050, the total system costs, the annual coal consumption in 2025, data on uranium
and enrichment utilization, the installed capacity of each reactor type in year 2026, and
the levelized power cost of each reactor type for a reactor starting up in year 2025. The
most striking conclusion that can be drawn from the comparison of levelized power costs of
each reactor type is that there isn't a large difference.
the total amount of uranium consumed doesn't vary much from case to case because when
uranium becomes expensive, fossil plants are constructed in place of nuclear plants. This
point is demonstrated in Table D-5, which shows the time behavior of the U308 price. It
can be seen from this table that the differences in the price of U308 for the different
nuclear systems are not large.
The reason, of course, is that