|
|
This article explores the institutional architecture in place to govern energy in the US and its underlying principles. More specifically, it identifies the key institutions involved with energy decision-making, with an emphasis on the national level and key legislative acts of the past four decades. The second section explores six historic guiding principles connected with national energy production and use, and the third section identifies how each of these conditions is eroding. The fourth section highlights the general implications of this shift for energy governance, namely that energy decision-making is now complex, inconsistent, vertically and horizontally fragmented and politicized.
|
This paper analyzes the socio-cultural, political and economic conditions prevalent during the inception of nuclear power programs in Japan and South Korea in order to identify commonalities which support nuclear power program expansion. The study identifies six factors as having a clear influence on supporting nuclear power development: (1) strong state involvement in guiding economic development; (2) centralization of national energy policymaking and planning; (3) campaigns to link technological progress with national revitalization; (4) influence of technocratic ideology on policy decisions; (5) subordination of challenges to political authority, and (6) low levels of civic activism. The paper postulates that...
|
This article was submitted as a runner up and introduction to JIES 7.3, a special issue on the policy, science and dilemmas of nuclear energy in the 21st century. It provides an overview of some of the key challenges surrounding the so-called ‘nuclear renaissance’. It provides a broad context for the more specific concerns with the social and political aspects of radioactive waste which will be considered in the next issue. What are the likely consequences of a global nuclear power renaissance? This article answers that question by exploring six categories of costs and benefits associated with modern nuclear power plants: capital and production costs, safety and reliability, fuel costs, land degradation, water use,...
|
This article develops a broad sociological understanding of why biofuels lost out to leaded gasoline as the fuel par excellence of the twentieth century, while drawing comparisons with biofuels today. It begins by briefly discussing the fuel-scape in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, examining the farm chemurgic movement, New Deal agricultural policies, mechanization trends within agriculture, and, finally, the invention of leaded gasoline. The second half of the article applies insights from that historical analysis to the biofuel craze currently under way. By employing a political-economy interpretation of the socioeconomic context combined with a path-dependency-informed...
|
This scholarly work explores the causes precipitating the collapse of the nuclear industry during the late 1970s and early 1980s, viewing the nuclear energy sector as a paradigmatic example of the fundamental incompatibility between democracy and capitalism. Though he never explicitly blames either capitalism or democracy, author John L. Campbell explains how the fact that the two are governed by contradictory decision-making logics ultimately doomed the nuclear industry during the time period he examines. Campbell considers policy constraints and faliures in industry and government, such as a lack of standardization in reactor construction and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) inability to craft a reactor...
|
View more...
|
