Breakthrough’s Nuclear Cost Paper Most Downloaded of the Year at Energy Policy

In the last few years, Breakthrough’s staff have become leading experts on cost trends and economics of nuclear power. In April, the journal Energy Policy published “Historical construction costs of global nuclear power reactors” by Jessica Lovering, Ted Nordhaus, and Arthur Yip, which went on to become the journal’s most-downloaded article of 2016. This research generated the largest-ever dataset of nuclear power plant construction costs, analyzing countries where costs have increased like the United States and France and where costs have declined, as in South Korea. The paper was covered by Brad Plumer at Vox and Julian Spector at CityLab, among other outlets, and Lovering wrote about the paper’s central findings for Greentech Media.