Technoeconomic analyses for advanced nuclear technologies are essential for identifying cost drivers which allows for optimizing the technology to achieve better economical performance. Microreactors are emerging as a promising reliable-energy solution, offering inherent safety, low capital investment in comparison to large reactors, and rapid deployment capabilities. Despite literature attempts to conduct technoeconomic analyses for microreactors, there remains a need for an open-source technoeconomic model that can enhance collaboration, transparency, and consistency when performing this type of analysis. The present article takes the initiative by introducing an open-source microreactor technoeconomic model based on the bottom-up approach. This model leverages information and experience gleaned from the Microreactor Applications, Research, Validation and Evaluation (MARVEL) project in order to improve its own accuracy, and it can calculate the cost of a Nth of a kind (NOAK) microreactor that accounts for the reduced technology cost via learning as well as factory mass production of the technology. The technoeconomic model is applied for two reactors. These are the liquid-metal thermal reactor (LTMR) and the gas-cooled microreactor (GCMR). We strongly emphasize that this paper is not concerned with optimizing reactor designs considering economic objective. Rather, it simply suggests a model for conducting microreactor technoeconomic analyses. It must also be noted that the developed model is based on US projects reported data and the generalization of the model to outside the US requires significant adjustments to the model to address differences.
