Styles of Revaluation: The Case of the Levelized Cost of Electricity

Abstract

Making new nuclear investments is a challenging task. Their “value” is neither given nor stable: It is constantly being reformulated through processes of evaluation and, therefore, of valuation. The paper follows the specific uses of a standard method, the levelized cost of electricity, by different centers of calculations during a period marked by the intense scrutiny of nuclear energy policy and of the adoption of alternative nuclear fuel cycle technologies: from the George W. Bush administration through the beginning of the Barack Obama administration. Rather than concentrating on the finality of those calculations and their subsequent effects on the reordering of spent nuclear fuel as “waste” or “value,” the author develops the notion of “style of revaluation” and shows how concerned actors enacted different logics of valuation and embedded different audiences in their uses of the same calculative device. The paper characterizes two styles of revaluation related with this period. In the first style, referred to here as the “monetary figures of dissent,” a multitude of disagreements over political and moral values associated with alternative fuel cycle technologies are translated into into the language of economic expertise and monetary figures, while policy makers are designated as the audience for the calculations. In the second style, which the author refers to as the “return-on-investment,” financial investor at large is considered as the audience for the calculations, and investment is to be guided by the morality of the return-on-investment. Such assessments are critical for science and democracy. It is crucial that their designers and users, whether those are academics, practitioners, or policy makers, acknowledge and articulate moral and political values they inscribe in them.

Keywords:

• Alternative fuel cycles
• the levelized cost of electricity
• financial investment
• valuation
• spent nuclear fuel

Notes

^a It is a tool regarded by its designers and users as a solution to an otherwise difficult problem of social, economic, and political life.¹

^b Field notes from MIT Energy Forum panel session, “The Future of Nuclear Energy After Fukushima,” November 2011, MIT, Sloan School of Management.

^c Here, driving on Abbott,¹⁰ the notion of “jurisdictional claim” is used to underline the intimate relationship between knowledge production and the role a discipline and expertise acquire in a given field of application.

^d Spent nuclear fuel is the fuel that has been used to generate electricity mainly at commercial nuclear power plants. It is materially composed of 94% uranium, 1% plutonium, and other actinides at varying hazard and heat levels, and with lifetimes extending to thousands of years. It is thermally very hot and highly radioactive. The plutonium present in its composition makes spent nuclear fuel, which, if separated through the deployment of specific technologies, a material that can be used in the production of atomic bombs. Within the nuclear industry, open fuel cycles and closed fuel cycles are differentiated. An open fuel cycle (also called a throwaway fuel cycle or a once-through fuel cycle) implies that once spent nuclear fuel leaves reactor core it is stored in spent nuclear fuel pools or dry casks until final disposal in a geological repository. This is the fuel cycle currently deployed in the United States.

^e For such studies, see, for instance, “Back to the Future: Small Modular Reactors, Nuclear Fantasies, and Symbolic Convergence,” by B. K. Sovacool and M. V. Ramana, in Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 96–125 (2015), and “Categorization by Association: Nuclear Technology and Emission-Free Electricity,” by R. Garud, J. Gehman, and P. Karnøe, in Research in the Sociology of Work, Vol. 21, pp. 51–93 (2010).

^f The State of Illinois hosted a large number of nuclear power plants, and almost 50% of its energy needs were met by nuclear energy.

^g Notes from an interview with Ernie Moniz at his office at the MITEI, December 14, 2011.