Trade-off Between Cost and Safety To Cope with Station Blackout in A PWR in A Deregulated Electricity Market

In this paper a close solution is presented to determine the trade-off between cost and safety to cope with station blackout (SBO) in Pressurized Water Reactors (PWRs). To compute the profit of each generation unit, a Supply Function Equilibrium (SFE) model swhich considers carbon tax is used in a uniform electricity market. A hierarchical heuristic method is applied for decision making on safety improvement of Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs). In this method the break-even point is used as a criterion to make a decision on comparing cost of safety improvement and profit of NPP in a deregulated electricity market. This method is applied in a case of adding an Emergency Water Supply (EWS) and an Emergency Diesel Generator (EDG) to a NPP where impacts of its investment cost and its profit are investigated. The achieved results show that the break-even point of investment cost and net profit of the NPP by adding the EDG is one month later than NPP with addition of EWS.