Benefit and risk evaluation of inland nuclear generation investment in Kazakhstan combined with an analytical MGT method

PurposeIn the process of building the “Belt and Road” and “Bright Road” community of interests between China and Kazakhstan, this paper proposes the construction of an inland nuclear power plant in Kazakhstan. Considering the uncertainty of investment in nuclear power generation, the authors propose the MGT (Monte-Carlo and Gaussian Radial Basis with Tensor factorization) utility evaluation model to evaluate the risk of investment in nuclear power in Kazakhstan and provide a relevant reference for decision making on inland nuclear investment in Kazakhstan.Design/methodology/approachBased on real options portfolio combined with a weighted utility function, this study takes into account the uncertainties associated with nuclear power investments through a minimum variance Monte Carlo approach, proposes a noise-enhancing process combined with geometric Brownian motion in solving complex conditions, and incorporates a measure of investment flexibility and strategic value in the investment, and then uses a deep noise reduction encoder to learn the initial values for potential features of cost and investment effectiveness. A Gaussian radial basis function used to construct a weighted utility function for each uncertainty, generate a minimization of the objective function for the tensor decomposition, and then optimize the objective loss function for the tensor decomposition, find the corresponding weights, and perform noise reduction to generalize the nonlinear problem to evaluate the effectiveness of nuclear power investment. Finally, the two dimensions of cost and risk (estimation of investment value and measurement of investment risk) are applied and simulated through actual data in Kazakhstan.FindingsThe authors assess the core indicators of Kazakhstan's nuclear power plants throughout their construction and operating cycles, based on data relating to a cluster of nuclear power plants of 10 different technologies. The authors compared it with several popular methods for evaluating the benefits of nuclear power generation and conducted subsequent sensitivity analyses of key indicators. Experimental results on the dataset show that the MGT method outperforms the other four methods and that changes in nuclear investment returns are more sensitive to changes in costs while operating cash flows from nuclear power are certainly an effective way to drive investment reform in inland nuclear power generation in Kazakhstan at current levels of investment costs.Research limitations/implicationsFuture research could consider exploring other excellent methods to improve the accuracy of the investment prediction further using sparseness and noise interference. Also consider collecting some expert advice and providing more appropriate specific suggestions, which will facilitate the application in practice.Practical implicationsThe Novel Coronavirus epidemic has plunged the global economy into a deep recession, the tension between China and the US has made the energy cooperation road unusually tortuous, Kazakhstan in Central Asia has natural geographical and resource advantages, so China–Kazakhstan energy cooperation as a new era of opportunity, providing a strong guarantee for China's political and economic stability. The basic idea of building large-scale nuclear power plants in Balkhash and Aktau is put forward, considering the development strategy of building Kazakhstan into a regional international energy base. This work will be a good inspiration for the investment of nuclear generation.Originality/valueThis study solves the problem of increasing noise by combining Monte Carlo simulation with geometric Brownian motion under complex conditions, adds the measure of investment flexibility and strategic value, constructs the utility function of noise reduction weight based on Gaussian radial basis function and extends the nonlinear problem to the evaluation of nuclear power investment benefit.