UC Irvine

This dissertation encompasses three works on nuclear power plants (NPPs). A theme common to all chapters is the question of why nuclear power has failed to achieve the success envisioned by its proponents, particularly when that success has been achieved at certain times and in certain places yet failed to continue into the present day or disseminate globally. I address my research questions with a theoretical framework informed by the study of political economy, which I argue is necessary to understand this politically-charged subject. In Chapter 1, I study lead time---the duration of construction and commissioning---which is an important determinant of the capital cost of NPPs. For an industry dominated by a handful of multinational firms, the degree of cross-national variation is surprising. NPP lead times have historically trended upwards over time in Western nations, and yet they are comparatively quick and stable in East Asia. I theorize that the institutional capacity and autonomy of subnational governments can partially explain these patterns in the data. Having assembled a novel dataset on the design specifications of the global population of NPPs, I empirically document a positive association between political decentralization and NPP lead time that is not explained by observed cross-country differences in NPP design. The results are suggestive of the hypothesis that political decentralization creates conditions that slow NPP construction for non-technical reasons. However, the findings are not robust to certain robustness checks and fail to rule out the possibility that unobserved differences in design explain this association.

In Chapter 2, I study the operational reliability of NPPs, which has globally trended upwards since the 1970s. Previously, Davis and Wolfram (2012) showed that the transfer of NPP ownership from vertically-integrated utilities under cost-of-service regulation to independent power producers operating in competitive wholesale electricity markets substantively contributed to the upward trend in reliability in the United States. However, international data reveal persistent and large cross-country differences in NPP reliability. Notably, NPPs in the United States substantially outperform their peers in other highly developed economies, even those with earlier and more comprehensive liberalizations of their electricity sector. The present work extends the analysis of Davis and Wolfram (2012) to nearly the global population of NPPs and encompasses a more diverse set of ownership structures and regulatory frameworks under which countries restructured their electricity markets beginning in the 1990's. I find the effects of restructuring on NPP reliability vary widely by country, with the clearest successes in the United States and Canada, but muted or even negative impacts elsewhere. Chapter 3 focuses specifically on the United States and makes three contributions. First, I present novel empirical evidence to support prior qualitative and historical work which characterizes the regulatory environment for NPPs in the United States as having dramatically escalated, beginning circa 1970. Second, I find a positive partial association between certain regulatory phenomena and the time required for a reactor to receive a license and begin commercial operation, subject to several controls. Among other results, I show that state intervention in reactor licensing (which is formally solely under federal purview) is positively associated with longer licensing duration, specifically in the 1970s but not earlier. Third, I ask whether the licensing hold-up achieved its stated goal of increased reactor safety. While my methods lack causal identification, I show that reactors which took longer to receive an operating license exhibit a noticeably lower rate of common, low-level safety incidents in comparison to other reactors of the same age and technical characteristics. Finally, in Appendix A, I present a novel dataset of NPPs that encompasses technical, economic, political, regulatory, and geographical characteristics of the global population of commercial nuclear power plants. I combined a large number of publicly available datasets with extensive original data collection and cleaning. My database is the backbone of this dissertation and should be of use for many possible future research projects. Except for certain restricted-access data provided by the International Atomic Energy Agency, I have made the data available for public dissemination at https://github.com/a-g-benson/Global-NPP-Database.