Methodologies for Assessing the Economic Consequences of Nuclear Reactor Accidents

111 Pages·2000·0.7 MB·English

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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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).
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