The Comparison of Externalities between Coal-Fired and Nuclear Power Plants

Fuel cycle externalities are the costs imposed on society and the environment that are not accounted for by the producers and consumers of energy. Traditional economic assessment of fuel cycles has tended to ignore these effects. However, there is a growing interest in adopting a more sophisticated approach involving the quantification of these environmental and health impacts of energy use and their related external costs. The fuel cycle externalities can be used for the internalization of them into the electricity price via eco-taxes and on undertaking cost-benefit analysis of available options by the policy analysts. The advantage of using externalities as criteria in the energy planning process instead of the common indicators such as pollutant emissions is that the criteria are expressed in the same monetary terms. The objective of this study is to estimate and compare the externalities for the coal-fired and nuclear power plants in Korea. The results are also compared with the European results