Abstract
The high uncertainty in overnight capital cost (OCC), as well as the large delays and cost escalation during construction, make nuclear power plants (NPP) unattractive for investors. In the US, a significant increase in the cost trend was found in correspondence to the 1979 accident event at Three Mile Island. A methodology based on the Iman-Conover method was developed to perform stochastic analyses on the construction schedule and cost accounts through Monte Carlo simulations accounting for variable correlations. A probabilistic assessment was then performed for the construction cost and time of a representative NPP, PWR12-BE. The mean value of the Total Capital Investment Cost (TCIC) for the PWR12-BE is $6.7 B, with a cost contingency of $582.1 M, which corresponds to 8.7% of the TCIC mean. The project duration has a mean of 10.7 years, with a relative standard deviation of 16.2%. However, the simulation results show lower predicted standard deviations of cost and time than the ones historically observed. The analysis demonstrates the need to extend the methodology to account for all uncertainties, including unexpected events, in the construction process of nuclear power plants. This aspect will be analyzed in a follow up paper (Maronati and Petrovic, 2018).
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