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Three Mile Island: The driver of US nuclear power’s decline?

2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 69; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/0096340213485949

1938-3282

Nathan Hultman, Jonathan Koomey,

Radioactive contamination and transfer

AbstractIt is tempting to attribute variations in support for nuclear power to prominent accidents such as Three Mile Island in the United States or Fukushima in Japan. To illuminate how such attribution can be problematic, the authors discuss the historical context of the Three Mile Island accident in the United States. They point out that the US nuclear industry faced major challenges even before the 1979 accident: Forty percent of all US reactor cancellations between 1960 and 2010, they write, occurred before the accident in Pennsylvania. While safety concerns were undoubtedly a driver of public aversion to new nuclear construction in the United States, the nuclear industry already faced substantial economic and competitiveness obstacles, much like the nuclear industry worldwide before Fukushima.KeywordsaccidentcancellationconstructionFukushimaindustrynuclear powerpower plantreactorThree Mile Island AcknowledgementsWe are grateful for discussions with Peter Bradford, Ralph Cavanagh, Mark Cooper, Victor Gilinsky, Jim Harding, Charles Komanoff, Amory Lovins, and Joe Romm. Gregory Carlock helped us with some data collection and analysis. Any mistakes or misinterpretations are our own.FundingThis research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.Additional informationNotes on contributorsAuthor biographiesNathan Hultman is an associate professor and director of the Environmental Policy program at the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy. He is also a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution.Jonathan Koomey is a research fellow at the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford University, and is the author of Cold Cash, Cool Climate: Science-Based Advice for Ecological Entrepreneurs (Analytics, 2012).Notes1 We used data from the electronic annex for Koomey and Hultman (2007) KoomeyJHultmanN (2007) A reactor-level analysis of busbar costs for US nuclear power plants, 1970–2005. Energy Policy 35(11): 5630–5642.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], combined with cancellation data from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (2012) Nuclear Regulatory Commission (2012) Cancelled US commercial nuclear power reactors. Available at: explore.data.gov/Energy-and-Utilities/Cancelled-U-S-Commercial-Nuclear-Power-Reactors/fxtq-q53p. [Google Scholar] and Clonemaster (1998) Clonemaster (1998) Cancelled nuclear units ordered in the United States. Available at: clonemaster.homestead.com/files/Cancel.htm. [Google Scholar]. Where the databases disagreed, we used the NRC data.