Guide for reviewing estimates of production-cost increases that result from nuclear power plant outages

Shutdowns of nuclear power plants typically result in significant increases in operating costs (production costs) for the affected utilities. This report presents a framework that will help users evaluate the reasonableness of estimated production-cost changes resulting from reactor shutdowns. The framework consists of three basic steps: (1) preliminary evaluation and classification of the outage, (2) evaluation of the input data and assumptions, and (3) evaluation of production-cost results. Several simplified procedures for estimating changes in production costs are presented.