Nuclear Energy

it acknowledged that the expected construction costs had increased to €4 billion. ccv Last year
(2010), it admitted that the project is two years behind schedule – it has only been under
construction for three! ccvi And that the cost estimate has escalated to €5 billion ($6.5 billion). ccvii
For both these cases, the only Generation III+ nuclear reactors under construction (in Western
Europe and North America), with cost estimates escalating to nearly double the contract price even
before the reactor construction has reached halfway, making a guess of the final construction cost
has become hazardous!
Let us compare these costs with construction cost of setting up a coal fired plant in India.
The construction cost of the OL3 1600 MW EPR was estimated at €5.9 billion in June 2010. Taking
the Euro-Rupee conversion rate as it existed in May-June 2010 of €1=Rs. 57, that works out to Rs.
21 crores/MW – nearly four and a half times the average cost of setting up a new coal power plant
(Rs. 4.5 crores/MW in India)!
With such astronomical construction costs, it is obvious that the cost of nuclear electricity
from these new reactors is going to be huge, much more than cost of electricity from fossil fuel
plants.
Part III: Nuclear Subsidies
The real cost of nuclear electricity is actually more than the above estimates. That is because
the above calculations do not take into account government subsidies to nuclear energy.
All governments throughout the world which have a nuclear energy program subsidise
nuclear energy. While France claims that its nuclear power costs are "the lowest in the world" ccviii ,
the reality is its entire domestic nuclear energy program has for decades profited from numerous
government subsidies. ccix The French government has subsidised the cost of construction of
France’s nuclear plants ccx , which dominate the cost of nuclear electricity. It has nationalised the
decommissioning and waste management costs: the waste management costs are estimated at
between $21 billion and $90 billion; ccxi the decommissioning cost estimates keep rising, and were
estimated to be 65 billion euros in 2004. ccxii It has also effectively taken over the accident risks – if
Electricité de France (EDF), France’s nuclear utility, had to insure for the full cost of a meltdown,
the price of nuclear electricity would increase by about 300%. ccxiii
The Campaign for Nuclear Phaseout, an alliance of anti-nuclear organizations of Canada, in
a report prepared in 2003 estimated that the total subsidies given by the Canadian government to the
Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) over the 50-year period 1953-2002 totalled a whopping
$17.5 billion! AECL is a Canadian government corporation that manages Canada's national nuclear
energy research and development program, including designing and marketing of CANDU reactors.
The calculations were based on figures given in AECL’s own annual reports. ccxiv
In the UK, British Energy, which had already got a huge subsidy when it purchased eight
nuclear plants from the government in 1996, got into financial difficulties and went bankrupt in
61