IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/diw/diwdeb/2016-44-1.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

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

Author

Listed:
  • Casimir Lorenz
  • Hanna Brauers
  • Clemens Gerbaulet
  • Christian von Hirschhausen
  • Claudia Kemfert
  • Mario Kendziorski
  • Pao-Yu Oei

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Casimir Lorenz & Hanna Brauers & Clemens Gerbaulet & Christian von Hirschhausen & Claudia Kemfert & Mario Kendziorski & Pao-Yu Oei, 2016. "Nuclear Power Is Not Competitive: Climate Protection in UK and France Also Viable without It," DIW Economic Bulletin, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research, vol. 6(44), pages 505-512.
  • Handle: RePEc:diw:diwdeb:2016-44-1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.546408.de/diw_econ_bull_2016-44-1.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Rinne, Sonja, 2018. "Radioinactive: Are nuclear power plant outages in France contagious to the German electricity price?," CIW Discussion Papers 3/2018, University of Münster, Center for Interdisciplinary Economics (CIW).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    nuclear power; Europe; UK; France;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L1 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance
    • L9 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Transportation and Utilities

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:diw:diwdeb:2016-44-1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Bibliothek (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/diwbede.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.