COVER STORY | STREAMLINING PRODUCTION


11000 10000 9000 8000 7000 6000 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000 0


1950


Size (MW) 1


500 1000 1500


Era


Demonstration Turnkey Completed before Three Mile Island accident Completed afterThree Mile Island accident


Mean $4,811/kWe


$800-2,200/kWe


7000 6000 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000 0


1960 1970 Date of construction start


Size (MW) 1


500 1000 1500


1980 1950 1960 1970


Era/Design French GCR


Westinghouse PWR CP Series P4 Series N4 Series


These conclusions are supported by data from the


Above, figure 1: US and French nuclear capital cost experience Source: Lovering (2016)


construction of fleets of nuclear power stations in the USA and France in the 1980s, as reported by Lovering et al in 2016 in their work on historical construction costs of global nuclear power reactors. The US built some fifty reactors using many different vendors, constructors and designs. At about the same time, France built about the same number of reactors based on a design provided by a single US vendor with direction from the centre and stable construction teams. The results summarised in Figure 1 show that for projects built in the 1970s and 1980s, the French power stations cost on average 60% less than those built in the US and were delivered as much as three years earlier.


The UK Energy Technology Institute in their Nuclear Cost


Below: French nuclear development followed a more standardised design, revealing cost savings


Drivers Project, CleanTech Catalyst & Lucid Strategy for UK, has highlighted more recent examples of good practice in nuclear power stations built in Japan and Korea that used standard designs and lean construction ideas. Their improved cost and schedule outcomes were similar to France in 1980s. These countries are now the benchmarks for nuclear construction worldwide. The difference between these benchmark projects and recent experiences in the UK, lies in how the projects are designed and procured. When programmes of new power stations are advanced project


by project, the result is usually a series of designs that are unique in detail, each project being built by a different team of suppliers and contractors. Instead, efficiency and economy can come from building the same design over and over again using the same teams. Flyvbjerg argues that the solution to the cost-effective delivery of nuclear power stations is to adopt a modular approach to designing and building them. If power stations consisted of a series of small modular reactors, each reactor would be cheaper and could be built faster, delivering power to the grid and revenues to the investors in less time. And if each small modular reactor (SMR) was built to a standard design using standard components made in factories, the process would be more efficient and more predictable. The critical step would be to advance programmes of several SMRs so that the successful vendors could invest in stable supply chains and modern production systems enabling them to learn from project to project and deliver continuous improvements in performance. SMRs have better potential for modularisation because of their smaller size and modularisation has the potential to reduce overall labour costs and schedule duration. But its success depends on the standardisation of the design, the supply chain, and the construction process. The size of the benefit of modularisation depends on the ability to break the design and its systems down into modules that can be fabricated, transported and assembled in-situ. A lesson from industries where modularisation has been used is the importance of production modelling to design the optimal overall production system including what to modularise and where to do the work. Two key decisions that will greatly influence the ultimate outcome. Taken together, the productivity improvements from


off-site manufacture and the economic effects of reducing the length of build schedules on capital costs – measured as the total cost of construction including interest during construction (TCIC) @7.8% pa – can be assessed. They show the baseline is a non-modular ‘stick-built’ system, with grades of increasing degree of modularisation (DoM). First, there is the effect of economies of scale – as reactor size reduces, construction cost increases due to the unwinding


32 | October 2023 | www.neimagazine.com 1980 Date of construction start


Mean $1,900/kWe


1990


2000


Overnight construction cost in USD(2010$)/KW


Overnight construction cost in EUR(2010$)/KW


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