Bangladesh, a developing nation experiencing significant population and industrial growth, faces an increasing demand for electricity. This demand is further compounded by global climate change, prompting a search for low-carbon electricity generation technologies to mitigate environmental impact. Among the clean energy technologies, nuclear power emerges as a promising solution to conceal emissions. The comparative performance of nuclear power against renewable and conventional generation technology in Bangladesh remains unexplored, which makes energy planning challenging. To overcome this issue, this study aims to conduct an evaluation of the comprehensive feasibility of nuclear, renewable, and conventional electricity generation technologies in the context of Bangladesh. Six decision-making criteria, including technical, environmental, economic, policy, and institutional factors, strategic significance, and socio-economic factors, were primarily adopted, and later these criteria were divided into 16 sub-criteria to make an evaluation using a multi-criteria approach. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was employed to evaluate alternatives with respect to each criterion to synthesize global priorities. The findings reveal that considering environmental superiority and social acceptance, renewable energy seize highest preference while nuclear power emerges as the best in terms of system reliability, base-load capacity, and geopolitical security. Traditional sources are scored lowest for sustainability and strategic horizon. Sensitivity analysis documents the stability of these rankings with respect to reasonable ranges of expert judgments. These results indicate that nuclear and renewable will be complementary to one another in the electric mix of Bangladesh. It can also help provide energy system stability and reduced greenhouse gases (GHGs) emissions for environmental sustainability.
Islam et al. (Fri,) studied this question.