15.1.1 What is new?

By the start of the twenty-first century, the background conditions for investing in new generating capacity had changed fundamentally. Fossil fuel prices increased dramatically (in large part by the accelerated demand in Asia, continued depletion of low-cost oil and gas occurrences and lack of investment in upstream operations) and fossil-sourced electricity no longer offered lower total generation costs in many markets. This improved not only the comparative economics of existing nuclear power plants (and spawned licence extensions) but also the prospects for new plant investment.

Energy security was back on the policy agenda of most countries, espe­cially those with high energy import dependence. Nuclear power offers not only diversification, a cornerstone of energy security, but also relatively stable and predictable generating costs in the long run due to its small share of uranium costs in total generating costs. As well, uranium occurrences are more widely spread globally than fossil resources,4 nuclear fuel volumes are small (and can be stored for several refuelling cycles) and refuelling schedules extend for as long as 18 to 24 months.

Next, climate change had become one of the most important energy and environmental policy challenges as manifested by the Kyoto Protocol (UN, 1998), the international environmental agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) aimed at the sta­bilization of atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) concentration at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system (UN, 1992). The Protocol was initially adopted in December 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, and entered into force in February 2005. On a life-cycle basis, nuclear power generates only a few grams of carbon dioxide (CO2) per kWh — orders of magnitude lower than fossil fuels (in the absence of [90]
costly carbon dioxide capture and storage) — at least comparable with the emissions of the best performing renewable supply options (see Fig. 15.5).