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Corporate Incentives and Nuclear Safety

Corporate Incentives and Nuclear Safety

Full Title:   Corporate Incentives and Nuclear Safety
Author(s): Catherine Hausman
Publisher(s): Energy Institute at Haas, University of California, Berkeley
Publication Date: November 1, 2011
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):

Approximately half of all commercial U.S. nuclear power reactors have been sold by public utilities to private, independent power producers in the past fifteen years. Previous work has found evidence of dramatically increased generation at these divested plants. At the time of the ownership transfers, some policy makers raised concerns that profit-maximizing corporations would ignore safety. Others, however, claimed that deregulation and consolidation would improve reactor management, and that corpora- tions would work hard to avoid costly plant shutdowns. This paper provides the first comprehensive evidence of the impact of these ownership transfers on plant safety. Us- ing a model of endogenous maintenance decisions, I show conditions under which safety is expected to improve following deregulation. I find empirical evidence that safety did not deteriorate, and in some cases increased, following divestiture.

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