Privatising Nuclear Power

Essay from the year 2009 in the subject Environmental Sciences, grade: A3, University of Abertay Dundee, language: English, abstract: After embarking on an agenda aimed at liberalization of the electricity industry, the UK government was faced with the question of whether to privatise the nuclear industry as part of the process. The purpose of this paper is to review the procedure adopted by the government in an attempt to privatise the industry, how the privatisation program progressed, the floatation of British Energy as the UK's nuclear energy company as well as the shortcomings and problems encountered along the way in the privatisation bid. This paper will critically analyze the Government's actions especially when the privatisation program developed problems and the Government had to step in with a financial bail-out of the industry. Finally, the current state of the UK nuclear industry will be discussed and a short conclusion will follow at the end. [...]

A timely contribution and incisive analysis, this is the story of the British experiment in privatizing the nuclear power industry and its subsequent financial collapse. It tells how the UK's pioneering role in nuclear power led to bad technology choices, a badly flawed restructuring of the electricity industry and the end of government support for

Deregulating electricity prices and privatizing publicly owned power system assets has been an economic disaster in North America and elsewhere. Instead of the promised abundance of lower-priced power, states and provinces that have embraced deregulation and privatization are now experiencing astonishing price spikes and unexpected shortages. Taking us from the very beginnings of the electricity industry in the 1880s right up to the present day, Howard Hampton vividly recounts the dramatic political struggles between public and private power in both Canada and the United States, a moving story that links Ontario's Sir Adam Beck, founder of North America's largest public power system, with Franklin D. Roosevelt, who established the still-public New York Power Authority and Tennessee Valley Authority, and Cleveland Mayor Dennis Kucinich, who sacrificed his political career rather than sell his city's municipally owned electric utility.