AUSTIN – Today the Texas Public Policy Foundation released a report by Senior Fellow Mario Loyola on the need to reform government regulation of America’s nuclear industry. The paper, The Need for Nuclear Regulatory Reform, examines interventions by the Department of Energy, which have imposed major losses on the U.S. nuclear industry, creating incentives against investment and capacity expansion in an industry that needs to be able to expand in order to keep providing American families with low-cost, reliable energy.
“The Department of Energy’s behavior in this sector is a particularly invidious kind of political capitalism,” said Loyola. “Normally, political capitalism serves industry with special benefits at the expense of working families. But here the Department of Energy is extracting special benefits for its own budget, at the expense of both private enterprise and working families.”
The report argues that because of DOE’s interventions, the U.S. nuclear energy sector faces extraordinary risks and regulatory burdens compared with its foreign competitors. This results in reduced nuclear energy capacity which, together with the higher financing costs associated with elevated levels of risk and regulation, combine to result in higher prices for nuclear energy, which are ultimately born by America’s working families.
To read the full report, visit: http://txpo.li/nuclear-regulatory-reform
Mario Loyola is a Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation is a non-profit, free-market research institute based in Austin, Texas.