Economic efficiency analysis of the nuclear power plants built in the Federal Republic of Germany as compared to coal-fired power plants

This thesis is based on a compilation of basic data over the period under review covering the years 1965 through 2015. All really accrued costs, such as plant cost, expenses of retrofitting and first core, and expenses involved in decommissioning of nuclear power plants are taken as a starting basis. If one judges the economic efficiency of nuclear energy, nuclear power plants as against the alternative of imported coal have an advantage of about 6% in the basic case, and 13% in the variation case. Moreover, they show an advantage of about 40%, in the basic case, as against mixed coal-fired power plants. A strategy based on 50% of local coal and 50% of imported coal, taking into account the contracts on generation of electricity from coal, would doubtlessly have been the most probable one for the Federal Republic of Germany. Nevertheless, it has to be said that the economic efficiency of nuclear power plants as against the alternative of low-priced imported coal gets less advantageous if the plant construction takes more than 7-8 years. As one can see, nuclear power plants with an extended time of construction and the plants built in recent years are at a disadvantage compared with the imported coal alternative. One of the reasons, of course, is that the prices of imported coal over the last few years have strongly dropped. The alternative to nuclear power plants assumed in this thesis are coal-fired power plants on the same site, with the same capacity and the same year of commissioning. The alternative coal-fired plant is operated year after year at the same rate of capacity utilization as the nuclear power plant. As a reference price between the high price of coal from the Ruhr district and the low price of imported coal, a mixed coal price for the alternative scenarios was used. (orig./UA)