The capital cost of nuclear plants represents around 80% of the overall cost of nuclear power generation
On average fuel for nuclear power plants make up around 25% of the cost of production which is in contrast to coal, oil and natural gas plants where fuel is 80% of the cost of production. Staffing a 1GW uranium plant costs $50 million per year and fuel costs $30 million per year (20,000kg of uranium). The average fuel cost for nuclear power is $0.77 per kWh and the average non-fuel operations and maintenance cost in 2012 was 1.65 cents/kWh. Several large nuclear power plants were completed in the early 1970s at a typical cost of $170 million, whereas plants of the same size completed in 1983 cost an average of $1.7 billion, a 10-fold increase. Some plants completed in the late 1980s have cost as much as $5 billion, 30 times what they cost 15 years earlier. The unit nuclear power generation cost of 7.2 yen/kWh includes 1.9 yen/kWh in capital cost, 0.6 yen/kWh in fuel cost, 2.7 yen/kWh in operation and maintenance cost, 1.8 yen/kWh in backend cost and 0.3 yen/kWh in reactor decommissioning cost. The investment costrepresents less than 15% of total levelised costs; while O&M cost accounts for less than 10% in mostcases. Fuel cost represents on average nearly 80% of the total levelised cost and up to nearly 90% in somecases. These costs are provided in real terms and yield a total O&M cost of around £8.5/MWh which is close to the estimates by the (World Energy Council, 2007) of around £10.1/MWh, broken down as £6.6/MWh for O&M and £3.5/MWh for fuel costs. The United States is home to 99 nuclear power units, located in 31 states. Together, these plants generate almost 20 percent of America’s electricity, or approximately 8.5 percent of its total energy. [ i ]. Courtesy DOE/OCRWM. However, no new nuclear reactors have started up in the United States since 1996. During this 12-year period, labor costs escalated at an average rate of 18.7% compounded annually, the total cost escalated by 13.6%, and the materials cost escalated by 7.7%. Meanwhile, the national inflation rate was 5.7%, and the EEDB for coal-burning power plants escalated by 7.7% per year. The capital cost of 25GW of wind and 25GW of solar installed in Germany since 2000 under the feed in tarrif initiative is $150 billion, with annual subsidy costs of $1 billion in 2000 rising to $20 billion in 2011 for a total of $100 billion. For nuclear power, the capital cost of the plant constitutes roughly three fourths of the levelized cost of electricity, with fuel and operations and maintenance (O&M) costs making up the remainder of the cost in roughly equal proportions.
0.6 yen/kWh