NES Comparison (ASENES)

Introduction

The International Project on Innovative Nuclear Reactors and Fuel Cycles (INPRO) was established in 2000 with the goal of ensuring a sustainable nuclear energy supply to help meet 21st century global energy needs. INPRO’s activities are centred on the key concepts of global nuclear energy sustainability and the development of long-range nuclear energy strategies, so that nuclear energy is and remains available to meet national energy needs in interested IAEA Member States.
Innovative technologies to support future sustainable nuclear energy systems (NESs) are being analyzed/developed in many countries worldwide. With multiplicity of such developments the need periodically arises in Member States to evaluate the status, prospects, benefits and risks associated with development of particular technologies as compared to others, in order to prioritize/adjust the allotment of financing and other resources within national programmes on innovative nuclear technology development.
The existing NES evaluation tools require reasonably detailed design information for the components of a NES. For evolutionary systems such information is typically available, while future innovative NESs that are still under development normally lack sufficient design information for a full-scope assessment. Moreover, development of innovative systems could benefit from comparative analysis and evaluation, which is not among the objectives of most of the existing assessment tools. The INPRO collaborative project on Key indicators for innovative nuclear energy systems (KIND) had the objective to develop guidance and tools for comparative evaluation of the status, prospects, benefits and risks associated with development of innovative nuclear technologies for a more distant future [1,2]. A comparative evaluation of NESs requires judgment aggregation due to a multi-criteria character of the problem. Performance indicators characterizing different aspects associated with resource consumption, economy, proliferation risks, country specifics and waste management are conflicting by nature: increasing in a certain indicator may be associated with decreasing in other ones. Lack of common methodologies for decision-making when it is necessary to take into account a set of contradictory indicators in the NES performance comparative evaluation and, in particular, in the area of NESs sustainability assessments, complicates the procedure of formulating a coordinated vision of preferable technological and institutional solutions balanced on different costs, benefits, and risks. Wide application of multi-criteria decision analysis for judgments aggregation allows searching for compromises among the conflicting factors that determine the NES performance and calculating corresponding trade-off rates; carrying out a comparative evaluation of alternatives as well as choosing, ranking, and sorting corresponding options. Uncertainty analysis based on state-of-the art methods also should be included in the evaluations, thereby providing better grounds for judgments and enabling the decision-maker to reach a conclusion about the stability of the ranking results. The paper presents results illustrated the expedience of elaboration and application of a possible approach to NES/scenario options comparative evaluation based on multi-attribute value theory (MAVT) performed within the project. The article also provides recommendations regarding MAVT applicability for the KIND project objectives showing added value that may be obtained by implementation of the method for NESs comparative evaluation.