When does new nuclear beat cheap gas? We modeled the crossover.
Bottom-up techno-economic analysis for a reactor developer, tested against regional gas generation.
Client challenge
The developer needed to know whether its reactor could ever be cost competitive with combined cycle gas power at local fuel prices, and under exactly what conditions and strategies winning was possible.
What we did
Built a bottom-up cost model comparing nuclear and gas generation on the same basis, then tested sensitivity to the available tax credit, learning-rate assumptions and cost of capital before identifying the client-controlled decisions that would allow them to win in each scenario.
Shape of the outcome
Nuclear only crosses over at multi-unit fleet scale, which set a floor under any site strategy and PPA they could pursue. It wins with certainty only while the tax credit holds, which set a hard ceiling on the schedule to break ground. Delivered as a threshold chart rather than a headline number, so it stayed useful as the market moved.
Client anonymized. Outcomes shown as direction and ratio, not absolute figures.