ABSTRACT
We pull the lessons of the different country case studies together to answer the research question regarding the economic impact of nuclear safety. Although as a general proposition safety factors make nuclear power plants expensive, we see little evidence that raising standards makes a great difference to economic outcomes.
We compare the outcomes in two large nuclear programmes, USA and France, with France having demonstrably stricter nuclear safety rules compared to the USA. The USA has not been able to expand, or maintain, its nuclear fleet any easier than in the case of France. Hence we can conclude that the strictness of nuclear safety standards is not a significant factor in causing those differences.
The differences in regulatory outcomes seem associated with differences in cultural contexts rather than differences in regulatory institutions. The US case is influenced by anti-regulatory, individualist cultural bias. In other cases, South Korea has been recently been strongly influenced by egalitarian pressures; France, the UK, and to a certain extent China according to weak ecological modernisation practices. Russia is dominated by hierarchical biases associated with the fusion of the military and nuclear aspects of the nuclear sector.
