This page provides details of our estimation of the tariff from the reactors that the Indian government would like to import, such as the AP1000 or the EPR.
The specific calculations performed here present an estimate of the cost of electricity from the EPR reactors, as performed in 2013. Not only has this problematic economics not changed in the intervening years, all the data since then suggests that the cost per unit of electricity will be even higher. Some of the articles in the list of articles provide updates and comparisons with other proposed projects.
-
Our article for the Economic and Political Weekly presents a detailed calculation.
Click here to download the EPW article with references -
It is quite simple to reconstruct our calculation using the attached Mathematica notebook.
-
Click here to download the original Mathematica Notebook. A free notebook reader is available here.
-
Click here to download a pdf version of the notebook, which is quite readable if you don’t want to manipulate the calculation itself.
-
-
Alternately, click here to download an Excel Spreadsheet, which also contains most details of the calculation. Excel is simply not powerful enough to do some of the calculations that we needed, and this spreadsheet is a translation that we have provided for accessibility. The original calculations are in the Mathematica notebook above, and just in case you find a discrepancy between Mathematica and Excel that we have missed, it is the Mathematica version that is authoritative.
-
As explained in our EPW article, the computations are performed using a standard and well-known methodology established by the NPCIL itself. The government has never rebutted these figures or publicly presented alternative figures for the tariff. Just for the record, here is a copy of an old email to the executive director of the NPCIL (who has previously contacted us rebutting our arguments on other issues), asking for information about the tariffs, which was never provided.