WHAT DETERMINES THE EXTENT OF NATIONAL RELIANCE ON CIVIL NUCLEAR POWER?

The objective of this work is to better understand, quantitatively and objectively, the extent to which greater assurances of a supply of nuclear fuel could impact the degree that a state might choose to rely upon civil nuclear energy. Toward that end several quantitative measures of state attributes hypothesized to correlate with nuclear reliance (percentage of electrical power generated by nuclear energy) were identified, including two attributes intended to measure the extent to which states might in the past have reasonably considered themselves to have assured supplies of nuclear fuel. A linear regression of nuclear reliance against several of these variables is presented, and some possible implications of the resulting model are briefly discussed. As a prototypical application, among all states that might in the past not have felt adequate assurance of fuel supply, some halfdozen to a dozen states are identified that might be (or have been) candidates for additional nuclear power plants (NPPs), provided fuel supplies were somehow assured. Most of these would be candidates for at most one or two additional NPPs. These conclusions should be treated with some caution, because the data do not support a high degree of statistical confidence in the coefficient values they depend upon.