RSICC CODE PACKAGE PSR-447

1. NAME AND TITLE

REFCO83: Nuclear Fuel Cycle Cost Economics Code System.

2. CONTRIBUTORS

Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee through the Energy Science and Technology Software Center, Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

3. CODING LANGUAGE AND COMPUTER

Fortran IV; IBM3033 (P00447I303300).

4. NATURE OF PROBLEM SOLVED

REFCO83 utilizes a discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis procedure to calculate batch, cycle, and lifetime levelized average nuclear fuel cycle costs. REFCO83 is an outgrowth of the original REFCO program, written in the early 1970s, and later releases include the POWERCO and REFCO8 programs.

5. METHOD OF SOLUTION

The DCF analysis establishes an energy 'cost' associated with the fuel by requiring that the revenues from the sale of energy be adequate to pay the required return on outstanding capital, to pay all expenses including taxes, and to retire the outstanding investment to zero by the end of the economic life of the set of fuel investments. The program uses reactor mass flow information together with individual fuel cost parameters and utility capital structure and money costs to calculate levelized costs cumulatively through any batch or cycle. A fuel cycle cost component is considered to be any fuel material purchase, processing cost, or discharge material credit in the complete fuel cycle. The costs for each individual component, i.e. uranium, enrichment, etc., may either be expensed or capitalized for tax purposes or, in the case of waste disposal, the cost may also be made proportional to power production. To properly account for the effect of income taxes, all calculations in REFCO83 are done using 'then' current dollars, including price escalations caused by inflation. The database used for the default values for REFCO83 was taken from the Nuclear Energy Cost Data Base. The maximum number of fuel batches is 120.

6. RESTRICTIONS OR LIMITATIONS

None noted.

7. TYPICAL RUNNING TIME

A typical REFCO83 calculation requires about one second of CPU time.

8. COMPUTER HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS

The code was developed on IBM 3033 mainframe computers.

9. COMPUTER SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

REFCO83 was developed under the OS/MVT operating system. The software was initially released by the National Energy Software Center. It was transferred to RSICC and tested on an IBM 9672 under the MVS/ESA 4.2.2 using the VS Fortran 2.5.0 compiler. No modifications were made to the package when it was released by RSICC in October 2001.

10. REFERENCES

a) Included in documentation:

J.G. Delene and O.W. Hermann, "REFCO-83 User's Manual," NUREG/CR-3800, ORNL/TM-9186 (June 1984).

b) Background information:

"U.S. Department of Energy, Nuclear Energy Cost Data Base: A Reference Data Base for Nuclear and Coal-Fired Power Plant Generation Cost Analysis," DOE/NE-0044 (October 1982).

11. CONTENTS OF CODE PACKAGE

Included are the referenced document in 10.a and a DS/HD diskette which contains the IBM mainframe source code and test case written in DOS format.

12. DATE OF ABSTRACT

October 2001.

KEYWORDS: ECONOMICS