Building and Upgrading of Nuclear Power Plant Projects: Evaluation of Engineering, Procurement, Construction (EPC) and Regulated Asset Base (RAB) Models

Nuclear power plants are among infrastructure projects and provide public services that play a vital role for communities in the path of sustainable development. Since building and upgrading nuclear power plants has many technical and financial challenges, it is very important to select and use suitable contract models that can solve the challenges in the construction and operation stages of the mentioned power plants. Uzbekistan and the United Kingdom are looking to build, develop, and upgrade nuclear power plants in their territories, respectively, focusing on the engineering, procurement, construction (EPC), and regulated asset base model (RAB) models. Now the question is, which of the existing contract mechanisms in the field of construction and upgrading of nuclear power plants has a better performance? As a hypothesis, the technical complexities and the high cost of building and upgrading nuclear infrastructure projects require the use of appropriate contractual mechanisms such as the regulated asset base (RAB) model that could encourage the capable private sector as well as enable the advancement of several public service projects by the public sector in tandem. However, the paper aims to evaluate the aforementioned contractual models by relying on the descriptive-analytical study method, so as to draw the framework of a suitable contractual mechanism in the field of the aforementioned projects.