An interesting new paper The Political Economic Determinants of Nuclear Power: Evidence from Chernobyl by Makarin, Qian, and Wang was recently presented at NBER Pol. Economic conference. This paper is about how fossil fuel companies and coal miners in the US and UK used the Chernobyl disaster to successfully lobby against the construction of nuclear power plants. The data collection here is amazing but that’s how democracy works. I found the political economy section less interesting than some of the background material.
First, the Chernobyl disaster prompted the construction of a nuclear power plant (NPP) in the United States (upper left panel), the country with the most NPPs in the world. Surprisingly, the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 (much smaller than Chernobyl) had very little impact on design; although the 1-2 punch with Chernobyl in 1986 did not help. The same pattern is very clear across countries and across democracies (top right panel). The bottom two panels show the same data but looking at new plants rather than total accumulated—there was a sharp break in 1986 when growth turned to zero new plants per year.
Fewer nuclear plants than otherwise would have made the disaster less likely for countervailing forces:
We document that the decline in new NPPs in democracies after Chernobyl has been accompanied by an increase in the average age of NPPs in use. To meet the increased demand for energy, reactors built before Chernobyl continued to operate past their originally planned retirement dates. Using data from NPP incident reports, we show that such plants are more prone to accidents. The data indicate that Chernobyl led to the continued operation of the oldest and most dangerous NPPs in democracies.
In addition, safety is reduced because the existing plants have grown but in addition “the decline in NPP construction…has delayed the adoption of safer new plants.” This is a point about innovation that I often emphasize (see also here)
The key to innovation is continuous refinement and improvement…. Learning by doing requires doing….Therefore, when considering innovation today, it is important to think not only about the current state of technology but also about the entire trajectory of development. The best treatment today may be the best tomorrow.
The law increased costs significantly:
The US NRC requires six to seven years to approve NPPs. The total construction time after that ranges from decades to infinity. Cost overruns and changing regulatory requirements during the construction process sometimes force construction to be stopped after major sunk costs are incurred. This often leads investors to abandon construction after sinking billions of dollars in investment. Globally, companies have stopped building 90 reactors since the 1980s. 40 of them were in the US alone. For example, in 2017, two South Carolina utilities left two Westinghouse AP1000 reactors unfinished due to significant construction delays and cost overruns. At the time, this left two more US AP1000 reactors under construction in Georgia. The estimated initial cost of $14 billion for the two reactors has risen to $23 billion. Construction continued only when the US federal government pledged financial support. These were the first new reactors in the US in decades. In contrast, recent NPPs in China have taken only four to six years and two billion dollars
per reactor. When considering the choice of investing in nuclear power versus fossil fuel power, note that a typical natural gas plant takes about two years to build (Lovering et al., 2016).
Chernobyl to be clear was a very expensive disaster
The initial emergency response, and subsequent cleanup, requires more than 500,000 workers and an estimated cost of US$68 billion (2019 USD). Between five and seven percent of government spending in Ukraine is still Chernobyl-related. (emphasis added, AT) In Belarus, Chernobyl-related costs fell from twenty-two percent of the national budget in 1991 to six percent in 2002.
A major safety consequence of the decline of nuclear power plants was an increase in air pollution. The authors use satellite dating of ambient particles to show that when a new nuclear plant comes online pollution in nearby cities drops significantly. Second, they use pollution reduction to build the preceding measures of the effect of pollution on health:
According to our calculations, the creation of additional NPP, by reducing the amount of suspended particulate matter (TSP) in the environment, would on average save 816,058 additional life years.
According to our baseline estimates (Table 1), in the last 38 years, Chernobyl reduced the total number of NPPs worldwide by 389, which is almost entirely driven by the decline in new construction in democracies. Our calculations therefore suggest that, globally, more than 318 million expected life years have been lost in democracies due to the decline in NPP growth in these countries after Chernobyl.
The authors use the Air Quality Life Index from the University of Chicago which I think is on the high side of the rankings. Anyway, as you know, I think the new air pollution books are pretty reliable (here too) so I think the bottom line is probably right. Namely, Chernobyl caused many more deaths by reducing the construction of nuclear power plants and increasing air pollution have their direct effects which were small although not visible.
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