Competitiveness of Small-Medium, New Generation Reactors: A Comparative Study on Decommissioning

Smaller size reactors are going to be an important player of the worldwide nuclear renaissance. The economy of scale plays against the development of this kind of reactors, even if sometimes its influence is overestimated so that Small Medium Reactor (SMR) appears to have a Levelised Unit Electricity Cost (LUEC) significantly higher than Large Reactors (LR). However, the economy of scale applies only if the designs of SMR are similar to that of LR, but this is not the case, since the small size allows original design solutions not accessible to large size reactors. The literature already presents studies showing how, under certain assumptions, the Capital Cost and the Operation and Maintenance (O&M) Cost of a site provided by one large reactor is quite similar to another site composed by 4 SMRs providing the same power. However the literature still lacks of this kind of analysis about the decommissioning cost. The paper fulfill this gap investigating the cost breakdown of a decommissioning project and providing a literature review about its cost estimate techniques and managerial approach.