Study Quantifies Cost and Lives Lost Due to German Nuclear Phase-out

A new study by a team of economists at California and Pennsylvania universities has concluded that the closure of German nuclear power plants, though sold to the public as a way to improve safety, is actually killing 1100* people each year, and is leading to $12B/year in economic loss. 

"We use hourly data on power plant operations and a novel machine learning framework to estimate how plants would have operated differently if the phase-out had not occurred."

The economic loss is primarily due to the increase in local air pollution from burning more coal and lignite for electricity. The mortality loss is the biggest portion at $8.7B (they used $7.9M as the Value of a Statistical Life from a prior German study).   They valued CO2 emissions at $50/tCO2, which totaled a loss of $1.8B per year.  Increased operation of fossil fuel fired power plants added $1.6B in annual costs.  Finally, they credited the phase-out for reducing external costs of nuclear power (waste storage and accidents), but this only amounted to $0.2B (assuming 0.3¢/kWh), bringing the total to $12B in annual losses.

Plants fired with hard coal were the big winners following the closures, with their electricity production up 32%.  Because the closures reduced electricity supply, wholesale electricity prices increased by 3.9%, further boosting profits for all fossil fuel fired plants; profits at hard coal fired plants went up 64%.  

The 2019 paper by Jarvis, Deschenes, and Jha, is summarized here, and is published in its entirety here by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

* According to the paper, air pollution from fossil fuel use (primarily hard coal and lignite) by the German power industry produces 8,550 excess deaths per year, but this would be only 7,407 per year without the phase-out.  This considers closure of 11 GWatts of the German nuclear plants from 2011 through 2017; the remaining 9.5 GWatts of nuclear capacity are scheduled to close by 2022.