Three Essays on the Political Economy of Nuclear Power

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 electric