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Methodologies for Assessing the Economic Consequences of Nuclear Reactor Accidents PDF

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Nuclear Development and Radiation Protection M ethodologies for Assessing the Economic Consequences of Nuclear Reactor Accidents N U C L E A R • E N E R G Y • A G E N C Y  OECD, 2000.  Software: 1987-1996, Acrobat is a trademark of ADOBE. All rights reserved. OECD grants you the right to use one copy of this Program for your personal use only. Unauthorised reproduction, lending, hiring, transmission or distribution of any data or software is prohibited. You must treat the Program and associated materials and any elements thereof like any other copyrighted material. All requests should be made to: Head of Publications Service, OECD Publications Service, 2, rue Andre´-Pascal, 75775 Paris Cedex 16, France. Nuclear Development and Radiation Protection Methodologies for Assessing the Economic Consequences of Nuclear Reactor Accidents NUCLEAR ENERGY AGENCY ORGANISATION FOR ECONOMIC CO-OPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT ORGANISATION FOR ECONOMIC CO-OPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT Pursuant to Article 1 of the Convention signed in Paris on 14th December 1960, and which came into force on 30th September 1961, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shall promote policies designed: − to achieve the highest sustainable economic growth and employment and a rising standard of living in Member countries, while maintaining financial stability, and thus to contribute to the development of the world economy; − to contribute to sound economic expansion in Member as well as non-member countries in the process of economic development; and − to contribute to the expansion of world trade on a multilateral, non-discriminatory basis in accordance with international obligations. The original Member countries of the OECD are Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States. The following countries became Members subsequently through accession at the dates indicated hereafter: Japan (28th April 1964), Finland (28th January 1969), Australia (7th June 1971), New Zealand (29th May 1973), Mexico (18th May 1994), the Czech Republic (21st December 1995), Hungary (7th May 1996), Poland (22nd November 1996) and the Republic of Korea (12th December 1996). The Commission of the European Communities takes part in the work of the OECD (Article 13 of the OECD Convention). NUCLEAR ENERGY AGENCY The OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) was established on 1st February 1958 under the name of the OEEC European Nuclear Energy Agency. It received its present designation on 20th April 1972, when Japan became its first non-European full Member. NEA membership today consists of 27 OECD Member countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States. The Commission of the European Communities also takes part in the work of the Agency. The mission of the NEA is: − to assist its Member countries in maintaining and further developing, through international co-operation, the scientific, technological and legal bases required for a safe, environmentally friendly and economical use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, as well as − to provide authoritative assessments and to forge common understandings on key issues, as input to government decisions on nuclear energy policy and to broader OECD policy analyses in areas such as energy and sustainable development. Specific areas of competence of the NEA include safety and regulation of nuclear activities, radioactive waste management, radiological protection, nuclear science, economic and technical analyses of the nuclear fuel cycle, nuclear law and liability, and public information. The NEA Data Bank provides nuclear data and computer program services for participating countries. In these and related tasks, the NEA works in close collaboration with the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, with which it has a Co-operation Agreement, as well as with other international organisations in the nuclear field. Publié en français sous le titre : MÉTHODES D'ÉVALUATION DES CONSÉQUENCES ÉCONOMIQUES DES ACCIDENTS NUCLÉAIRES © OECD 2000 Permission to reproduce a portion of this work for non-commercial purposes or classroom use should be obtained through the Centre français d’exploitation du droit de copie (CCF), 20, rue des Grands-Augustins, 75006 Paris, France, Tel. (33-1) 44 07 47 70, Fax (33-1) 46 34 67 19, for every country except the United States. In the United States permission should be obtained through the Copyright Clearance Center, Customer Service, (508)750-8400, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA, or CCC Online: http://www.copyright.com/. All other applications for permission to reproduce or translate all or part of this book should be made to OECD Publications, 2, rue André-Pascal, 75775 Paris Cedex 16, France. FOREWORD A comparative study of accident consequence assessment codes, completed jointly by the NEA and the EC in 1993, concluded that the prediction of economic consequences was one of the least mature areas of such computer modelling, and should be studied further. Accordingly, the NEA Committee on Radiation Protection and Public Health (CRPPH) and the NEA Committee for Technical and Economic Studies on Nuclear Energy Development and the Fuel Cycle (NDC) created a joint expert group in 1994 to investigate the methodologies used in calculating the economic consequences of accidents, and the bases for such methodologies. Calculation methods were assessed according to three end uses: for compensation and liability purposes; for accident preparedness and management purposes; and for making electricity-generation choices. The group concluded that comparing numerical results is very difficult, even for estimates made from the same perspective, as more detailed “boundary” conditions (such as the accident scenarios used, plant characteristics and source terms) also affect results. This report provides a summary of the expert group’s findings. It reflects the collective views of the participating experts though not necessarily those of their parent organisations or Member governments. This report is published under the responsibility of the Secretary-General of the OECD. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS FOREWORD .................................................................................................................................... 3 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY.................................................................................................................... 7 INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................................ 11 Background .................................................................................................................................... 11 Joint NDC/CRPPH Expert group on the methodologies for assessing the economic consequences of nuclear reactor accidents...................................................................................... 12 Scope of the report.......................................................................................................................... 12 Report organisation and structure.................................................................................................... 13 COST ELEMENTS FOR CONSEQUENCE ASSESSMENT MODELS.......................................................... 15 Definitions in the evaluation of economic consequences................................................................ 15 Boundaries and limitations of the estimation of economic consequences...................................... 16 Cost of countermeasures.................................................................................................................. 17 Cost of radiation-induced health effects.......................................................................................... 23 Indirect or secondary effects........................................................................................................... 25 PERSPECTIVES OF COST ASSESSMENT.............................................................................................. 27 Introduction: cost assessment perspectives..................................................................................... 27 The accident preparedness and management perspective............................................................... 28 The compensation perspective........................................................................................................ 30 The power generation choice perspective....................................................................................... 32 CURRENT MODELS AND CODES FOR THE ASSESSMENT OF ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES.................. 39 Background..................................................................................................................................... 40 Intercomparison exercises............................................................................................................... 41 Model capabilities and limitations................................................................................................... 42 CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS........................................................................................ 57 5 Annex I External costs of nuclear reactor accidents: a short survey of nuclear accident external cost studies ................................................................................................... 59 Annex II The full-scale PSA approach to assessing the external cost of reactor accidents....... 67 Annex III Regimes at the international level governing civil liability and compensation for nuclear damage to third parties................................................................................... 73 Annex IV Compensation after a nuclear accident and the role of insurance............................... 81 Annex V An assessment of the economic consequences of the Chernobyl accident in Norway................................................................................................................... 89 Annex VI The macro-economic impacts of a nuclear accident................................................... 95 Annex VII Members of the Expert group..................................................................................... 105 REFERENCES.................................................................................................................................... 107 6 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The interest of its Member countries in the assessment of the consequences of nuclear accidents led the OECD/NEA to conduct two international probabilistic consequence assessment (PCA) code comparison exercises, the first during the early 1980s and the second, jointly with the European Commission, during the early 1990s. One of the key recommendations resulting from the second exercise suggested that further work should be done to better estimate the economic consequences of nuclear accidents. Also during the early 1990s, a large number of estimates of the costs of hypothetical nuclear accidents were published, often in a widely publicised fashion, which were used in accounting for the externalities of nuclear energy generation, namely, the costs not included in the price of electricity. The numerical results of these studies tended to diverge by several orders of magnitude. Experts within the NEA programme felt that the bases for these estimates were unclear and that they were, perhaps, not well founded. In response to these developments, the NEA Committee on Radiation Protection and Public Health (CRPPH), jointly with the NEA Committee for Technical and Economic Studies on Nuclear Energy Development and the Fuel Cycle (NDC), created in 1994 the Expert group on the Methodologies for Assessing the Economic Consequences of Nuclear Reactor Accidents. The Group was asked to carry out an in-depth study of the methodologies for assessing the economic consequences of nuclear reactor accidents. Specific areas for attention would be: • The methodologies and techniques used to quantify economic impacts of nuclear reactor accidents. • The applications of economic impact assessments. • The uncertainties in current assessment models and the quality of input data. • The identification of those areas where improvement would be valuable. The Expert group agreed that the scope of its studies should only include: • The off-site radiological consequences of nuclear reactor accidents, i.e., health effects on the exposed population and its descendants. • Direct and indirect effects on the environment and on the economy of the affected area (which may include areas not directly touched by contamination). • The social disruptions and repercussions which would inevitably follow such an event and the associated implementation of protective countermeasures. The Expert group reviewed in some detail the elements to be considered in estimating the total off-site costs caused by a severe nuclear accident, as well as the boundaries and limitations which constrain this kind of assessment. The Group reached very early a consensus on the conclusion that there is no single “cost of an accident”. It was, in fact, realised that the cost elements considered and 7 the methodology used to combine those cost elements depend greatly upon the objective of the cost study and the intended use of the resulting “accident cost”. The Group chose, therefore, to investigate methodologies for calculating costs from three perspectives: • Accident preparedness and management. • Compensation for the affected parties. • Power generation choices. According to the Group’s view, the objective of calculating the cost from the accident preparedness and management perspective was to optimise the planning and implementation of countermeasures to be taken to mitigate the detrimental consequences of a major accident, in both the short and the long term. Because the optimisation of countermeasures had been one of the prime objectives since the early days of this type of accident consequence assessment, the cost elements associated with this perspective were fairly well understood. In terms of results, however, costs varied considerably depending upon local details. Another important perspective addressed by the Expert group was the compensation of those affected by an accident. It was suggested that the general public expects existing liability regimes and other systems of financial security provided for this purpose should ensure that the operator who had caused the damages would compensate all consequences of a nuclear accident. However, it was observed that the compensation systems set up under the existing international conventions and national legislation did not fulfil completely this expectation and this issue. The third perspective explored was that of power generation choices. When assessing the various options for electricity generation, a key factor is the cost. External costs are the economic consequences of an activity that accrue to society, but which are not explicitly recognised in the decision-making process. In the case of electricity production, external costs are those which are not included in the price of electricity. The Group suggested that state-of-the-art, rational and defensible methodological approaches should be used to quantify these costs, and should be based on full-scope, site-specific probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) studies. Such an approach would account for the relative costs of all accidents, which can be modelled using PSA studies for the specific plant in question. Obvious shortcomings of this approach included: the burden of producing very detailed PSA studies, the inherent uncertainties of these PSA studies, and inherent uncertainties in the micro- and macro-economic effects of wide-scale contamination and societal disruption. The Group also noted that the statistical techniques necessary to characterise radioactive releases and depositions were relatively new and were being continuously improved; current developments of computing techniques were contributing to this improvement. In terms of micro-economic aspects, the Group discussed in great detail the various modelling elements necessary to accurately predict the costs of environmental and health damage. The availability of data and its accuracy were addressed qualitatively. These were seen as being important aspects with regard to the relative and absolute confidence attached to the numerical values which were generated. In terms of macro-economic aspects, the Group suggested that “input-output” methods should be used. This approach considered the interchanges between the different economic sectors of a region or a country as a factor in the analysis of impacts of population movement or countermeasures in agriculture. The difficulties with these methods were associated with the compilation of suitable input-output tables, with the calculational effort required, and with the definition of non-directly affected areas, (some effects may extend over an entire country). 8

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and sustainable development. Specific areas of competence of the NEA include safety and regulation of nuclear activities, radioactive waste management, radiological protection, nuclear science, economic and technical analyses of the nuclear fuel cycle, nuclear law and liability, and public informat
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