Engineering, economics, or afterthought? Exploring the culture of cost analysis in nuclear reactor design research

A significant number of nuclear reactor projects have experienced cost overruns and construction delays over the past few decades, impairing the commercial viability of nuclear power. While many of these cost overruns are attributable to project management, recent studies find that the causes of cost overruns may equally be rooted in design process factors such as excessive complexity and incompleteness of reactor designs, leading to poor economic outcomes. Given this, we carry out a systematic review of design-focused nuclear engineering studies indicating the importance of economics to design work. Our examination of one hundred and eighty-six papers published over a twenty-three-year period (2000–2023) shows a rise in the number of papers (102 of 186 in the sample) that do not carry out sufficient economic analysis. Further, the majority of studies are not grounded in the historical economic context, do not use economic proxies, or recommend future economic work. Conversely, the remaining papers that do carry out sufficient economic analysis exhibit certainty and optimism in their economic results that may be unfounded. The majority of the primary authors of the sampled papers are affiliated with universities. However, this finding of a lack of robust economic analysis should not be dismissed as the work of academics bearing no real-world relevance, as private companies increasingly collaborate with and are spun out of universities, and university-trained nuclear engineers go on to design ‘real’ reactors. Our findings thus point to the need to establish a more robust culture of economic analysis in nuclear academic settings.