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Cost of Electricity from the Jaitapur Nuclear Power Plant
The Indian government has announced that it plans to purchase six European Pressurised Reactors for Jaitapur from the French company, Areva. No EPR is in commercial operation anywhere else in the world. Estimates of costs from plants under construction in Finland and France suggest that each unit may cost as much as Rs 60,000 crore; at this price, six units will cost Rs 3.6 lakh crore. The paper shows that the expected starting tariff for electricity from these reactors, without including transmission and distribution costs, is likely to be around Rs 15 per unit (kWh). The existing revenue model used by the government already involves a large loss for the taxpayer. The government may seek to make the tariff from Jaitapur competitive by increasing the scope and nature of these handouts.
We thank the two anonymous reviewers for carefully going over our paper and offering critical comments. We are grateful to Lauri Myllyvirta for collaboration in the early stages of this project and to Tejal Kanitkar for sharing her calculations with us. We thank Vivek Monteiro and Adwait Pednekar for several discussions and important information about the Jaitapur plants, and Phil Chaffee and Stephanie Cooke for information on EPR costs and uranium prices. The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the authors and do not represent the offi cial positions of any of the academic institutions that the authors are affi liated with.
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