NES Comparison (ASENES)

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. The INPRO Collaborative Project on Key indicators for innovative nuclear energy systems 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. This article presents selected results of the project illustrating a possible procedure of comparative evaluation of nuclear energy systems and its trial application for the hypothetical nuclear energy systems to demonstrate those judgments aggregation capabilities which may be provided by the multi-criteria decision analysis methods in identification of merits and demerits associated with considered technological options that are required for these options ranking and sorting as well as selecting the most promising ones.

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.

Comparative evaluation of NES/scenario options based on the MAVT method

Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) is a tool aimed at supporting decision makers who are faced with making numerous and conflicting assessments and intend to highlight conflicts and find compromises in the decision making process [3,4]. The MCDA problems consist of a finite number of alternatives, explicitly known in the beginning of the decision support process. Each alternative is represented by its performance in multiple criteria. The problem may be defined as finding the best alternative for a decision maker, or finding a set of acceptable trade-off alternatives. Studies properly organized on the MCDA base represent a process not only formally operating with a set of mathematical methods and various analytical tools, but also leading to a comprehensive understanding of the problem and its elaboration. MCDA does not provide a ‘right solution’, in this regard it would be correct to talk about a compromise or a trade-off solution, paying special attention to an analysis of the solution stability to various methods used and their model parameters.