The decline of civil nuclear power programs: Why state-owned enterprises hold the key to success in the Post-Fukushima Era.

Abstract

Civil nuclear power is declining in Canada, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and rapidly expanding in China, France, India, Russia, and South Korea. The disaster at Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant changed the future of nuclear power. For some states that means drastic shifts away from nuclear, and for others it means that the future of nuclear just became more difficult and expensive. This paper seeks to examine the role that state-owned enterprises play in advancing nuclear programs, and the difficulties that states without state-owned enterprises will face in this new future. A state-owned enterprise is a corporation that conducts the business of the state that is either wholly owned by the government, or where a government owns controlling shares of a private corporation. (e.g., Amtrak, Freddie Mac, etc.) I posit that the presence of state-owned enterprises, or a government’s controlling interest in a private nuclear energy corporation, enables governments to advance their state’s civil nuclear power programs.This will be analyzed by examining nuclear power plant construction times, and completion rates for states that operate nuclear state-owned enterprises against those of private corporations. The results show that states operating state-owned enterprises have higher completion rates and quicker completion times.