DCAF

The Discounted Cash Flow Analysis Framework is a professional financial engineering library for nuclear energy project cost and metric calculations, with a focus on Extended Power Uprate (EPU) projects.

Installation

Install the dcaf-idaholab distribution from PyPI:

uv add dcaf-idaholab
# or: pip install dcaf-idaholab

The Python import package remains dcaf:

from dcaf import EnergyProject

Overview

DCAF provides high-fidelity cost modeling and financial analysis tools specifically designed for nuclear energy projects. The library enables detailed financial analysis including:

• Net Present Value (NPV), Discounted Cashflow (DCF) and Internal Rate of Return (IRR) calculations
• Financing cost modeling with accurate interest calculations
• Tax and incentive analysis
  • Production Tax Credits
  • Investment Tax Credits
  • MACRS and VDB depreciation scheduling
• Pro-forma generation for detailed financial projections
• Comprehensive cost modeling for EPU projects

Day Count Conventions

Project analyses default to actual/actual, which uses real calendar days and splits annual-rate calculations by calendar year so leap-year days use a 366-day denominator. Use actual/365-no-leap when you intentionally want normalized 365-day project years that exclude Feb. 29 from elapsed-day counts. Use actual/365-fixed when you need actual calendar days divided by 365.

The project-wide default is set with EnergyProject(day_count_convention=...) or .day_count_convention(...), and it flows into NPV, IRR, LCOE, escalation, construction interest, operating-year proration, and capacity-hour generation.

Bank-loan and bond-style conventions such as actual/360 and 30/360 are useful future additions, but they are not implemented yet.