THE COST OF NUCLEAR POWER COMPARED WITH ALTERNATIVES TO THE MAGNOX PROGRAMME

The British 'Magnox' stations were among the earliest civil nuclear power stations in the world and, with hindsight, the program was too large an investment in an obsolescent technology. This paper estimates the cost incurred by building the Magnox stations rather than the conventional stations that would have been ordered instead using a simulation model of the industry to calculate fuel costs. If a 5 percent discount rate is used, the lifetime cost per unit generated by the Magnox stations is nearly 50 percent greater than if a counterfactual program of coal-fitted stations had been built. Copyright 1995 by Royal Economic Society.