The State and the Nuclear Waste Crisis: An Institutional Analysis of Policy Constraints

Abstract

The U.S. government has failed to provide for the reprocessing of radioactive waste despite the fact that commercial reactors have produced several million pounds of it over the last thirty years. I analyze this policy-making failure by focusing on the important institutional constraints that limited the ability of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to implement its reprocessing plan. I show how competition in the private reprocessing industry, the extreme vulnerability of policymakers to conflicting political demands, the legislation limiting state intervention into the private sector, produced this policy failure. I also show how a different institutional context in France produced a successful reprocessing policy outcome. This study stands in contrast to others about nuclear policy that describe the state as being extremely successful in nuclear policy-making. This has important implications for both the historical analysis of nuclear energy policy, theories of the state, and policy analysis.

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