Economic Assessment of Russian Nuclear Strategies on the Basis of Fast Breeder Reactors

The paper assesses the economic risk caused by the delay in commissioning innovative nuclear power plants with fast breeder reactors in Russia. The risk is quantitatively measured by the excessive costs for energy development and the possibility of implementing the considered variants that differ in power consumption, technical and economic indices of the reactors, and constraints on CO2 emissions. The probability distribution functions of economic losses for different strategies of nuclear energy development are constructed. 1. Introduction Investigation of long-term perspectives of world development shows that nuclear energy is the most efficient means for decreasing CO2 emissions [1]. Fast breeder reactors (FBR) should be applied also due to depletion of economically efficient uranium-235 resources [1–5]. The closed fuel cycle will allow using the additional fissile material, that is, plutonium received from uranium-238 isotope (99.3% in natural uranium), while now only natural fissile material-uranium-235 (0.7% in natural uranium), is used. Thus it will allow increasing the nuclear fuel reserves that will be sufficient throughout thousands of years. In February 2010 the Government of Russia approved the Federal Target Program until 2020 designed to bring a new technology platform for the nuclear power industry based on fast reactors with a closed fuel cycle [6]. The paper aims to assess the economic risk caused by the delay in the large-scale commissioning of nuclear power plants with fast breeder reactors in Russia. In order to consider the relations of different energy sources among themselves and with the environment the energy sector should be treated as a whole system. The paper considers the nuclear power industry as part of the energy sector in Russia that, in turn, is analyzed in background of the world energy sector development. This is justified by the fact that the cost of energy resources in Russia, including uranium (and correspondingly the fuel component of energy cost), is determined not only by the costs for their production but also by the world market prices. 2. Method Future conditions of energy development are characterized by high uncertainty that usually is considered on the basis of a scenario approach [7–14]. We formulated two scenarios of constraints on CO2 emissions (soft and strict), three scenarios of power consumption (low, medium, and high), and four scenarios of technological development of the nuclear energy, which in total makes up 24 calculation variants. The calculations were performed using the global energy model