Joan Aron’s 1997 book Licensed to Kill? is a detailed case study of the decisions made by the public utility company LILCO, the AEC and NRC, New York state and local authorities, and citizen activist groups that led to the costliest failed investment in the history of nuclear power in the United States.
In 1991 the NRC made the decision to rescind the operating license for the Shoreham plant, after completion at a cost of over $5 billion but before it had generated a kilowatt of electricity.
Aron’s basic finding is that the project collapsed in costly fiasco because of a loss of trust among the diverse stakeholders: LILCO, the Long Island public, state and local agencies and officials, scientific experts, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Long Island tabloid Newsday played a role as well, sensationalizing every step of the process and contributing to public distrust of the process. She finds that the NRC and LILCO underestimated the need for full analysis of safety and emergency preparedness issues raised by the plant’s design, including the issue of evacuation from a largely inaccessible island full of two million people in the event of disaster. LILCO’s decision to upscale the capacity of the plant in the middle of the process contributed to the failure as well. And the occurrence of the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979 gave new urgency to the concerns experienced by citizens living within fifty miles of the Shoreham site about the risks of a nuclear plant.
As we have seen, Shoreham failed to operate because of intense public opposition, in which the governor played a key role, inspired in part by the utility’s management incompetence and distrust of the NRC. Inefficiencies in the NRC licensing process were largely irrelevant to the outcome. The public by and large ignored NRC’s findings and took the nonsafety of the plant for granted. (131)
(The title is an unfortunate choice, suggesting a much more lurid and partisan story than the one that Aron actually delivers.)
A Philosophy of Government 