Value chain · CLM-1414
In plain terms
The international nuclear agency's 2025 cost report counts the price paid for carbon emissions as part of what a kilowatt-hour costs, alongside building, running, fuelling and dismantling the plant.
The claim as recorded
The NEA's 2025 LCOE method puts carbon costs inside the levelised cost, as one of five annual cost terms discounted at one real rate. Its general LCOE equation sets discounted revenues equal to discounted costs, the costs being "Capital_t + O&M_t + Fuel_t + Carbon_t + DC_t", with Carbon_t defined as "Carbon costs in year t", and it assumes "an identical discount rate of 5% for all technologies and all countries", "a real discount rate, net of inflation".
Scope and limits
The equation is a method statement; the carbon price it uses is set elsewhere (CLM-1415). The method makes no difference between cost of capital and discount rate and does not consider "debt/equity splits, taxes and depreciation" (assumption 1, same page). It is plant-level LCOE: no system or firming cost enters the equation.
What it assumes
No assumptions are recorded against this claim.
Where it comes from
PDF 30 [28], equation (1), render read: "Sum_{t=1..n} P_MWh * MWh_t * (1 + r)^-t = Sum_{t=1..n} (Capital_t + O&M_t + Fuel_t + Carbon_t + DC_t) * (1 + r)^-t" (the page's sigma and subscripts written out in ASCII); "Carbon_t = Carbon costs in year t". Same page, raw: "This report assumes an identical discount rate of 5% for all technologies and all countries."; "The rate of 5% assumed for the calculations in this report is a real discount rate, net of inflation." "All output is sold at this tariff."
Basis: method; real discount rate
Cite this
energyaperture.com/c/clm-1414
CLM-1414, Energy Aperture, as of 2026.
Connected records
Other published records linked to this one. A list, not a judgement.
- Also from SRC-599
- CLM-0462A 2025 study by the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency and the US Electric Power Research Institute estimates that new large nuclear plants built...CLM-1415The 2025 international cost report adds 50 US dollars for every tonne of carbon dioxide a fossil plant emits, the same everywhere, when it...