Economic and Environmental Issues Associated with Deployment of Nuclear Energy Generation [articol]

Abstract

This paper presents completely comparison between generation cost analysis of nuclear power plants compared with two types of power plants that are natural gas and coal fired power plants. Also, the comparison of environmental impact between the nuclear power plants and both natural gas and coal will be regarded in this paper. Safety issues for the previously mentioned power plants are also studied in this paper. This paper aims to deliver a new type of power generation instead of these fossil fuel power generation. That’s because in last few years, the world started facing some difficulties in its energy sector. The situation has been caused by the growing demand for energy and the need for sustainable development reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The main challenge is the overdependence on coal and lignite-fuel power plants as well as single-source oil, gas and coal (despite its own resources). So, it is found that nuclear fission energy generation is the best choice for selecting a large scale clean type of energy generation. This scope of this paper study is the first constructed nuclear power plant located in El-Dhabaa City, Egypt. Egyptian government convinced to establish this nuclear power plant and started to replace its dependent on the traditional fossil fuel generation to nuclear energy and signed an Intergovernmental agreement (IGA) on 19 November 2015 with Russian Rosatom Corporation. This nuclear power plant has a capacity of 4800-MW, consists of four 1200-MW similar pressurized water nuclear reactors PWR and it is planned for nuclear share in the Egyptian energy mix to be 10% by 2030. The financial pros and cons of nuclear power are measured against its chief fossil-fuel competitors coal and natural gas. After these comparative studies, the results of these studies show that the nuclear power plants would be more cost than that from either coal or natural gas, but have the lowest cost of energy generation for longtime.