Multi-criteria planning of nuclear contribution to the goals of clean electricity in Mexico

Three scenarios of electricity expansion planning were developed to analyze nuclear technology's contributions to the socioeconomic development, mitigation of global climate change and energy security. The scenarios were developed based on minimal cost optimization satisfying the energy demand and the non-fossil electricity targets established by the Mexican National Energy Strategy (MexNES) of no more than 65% of annual electricity production using fossil fuels by 2024 and drop down to 60% by 2035. Special attention was paid to wind and nuclear as clean energy options to produce electricity. An analysis decision based on the Position Vector of Minimum Regret was applied to rank the different plans in terms of the criteria. Results showed that nuclear power must definitely participate in the Mexican electricity expansion in order to meet the goals of clean energy set by the MexNES. (author)