Nuclear Power Is Not Competitive: Climate Protection in UK and France Also Viable without It

Casimir Lorenz, Hanna Brauers, Clemens Gerbaulet, Christian von Hirschhausen, Claudia Kemfert, Mario Kendziorski and Pao-Yu Oei

DIW Economic Bulletin, 2016, vol. 6, issue 44, 505-512

Abstract: The nuclear power industry is faced with profound challenges— not only in Germany, but throughout Europe as well. New nuclear power plants are very expensive to build and even at high carbon prices, nuclear power is not competitive. Nevertheless, the EU reference scenario assumes that within the next three decades, new nuclear power plants will be built with a total capacity of at least 50 gigawatts (GW), and licenses will be renewed for a further 86 GW. Model calculations show that nuclear power would disappear from Europe’s power generation mix by 2050 were the decision based on economic factors and cost considerations alone. In Western Europe, the UK and France are still determined to implement their plans to build new nuclear power plants. But the model calculations for these two countries indicate that complete electricity sector decarbonization by 2050 would also be possible without nuclear power.

Keywords: nuclear power; Europe; UK; France (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L1 L9 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_ ... n_bull_2016-44-1.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:diw:diwdeb:2016-44-1

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in DIW Economic Bulletin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().