Freeing the Nuclear Industry

Colin Robinson ()
Additional contact information
Colin Robinson: Surrey Energy Economics Centre (SEEC), Department of Economics, University of Surrey

No 85, Surrey Energy Economics Centre (SEEC), School of Economics Discussion Papers (SEEDS) from Surrey Energy Economics Centre (SEEC), School of Economics, University of Surrey

Abstract: In an energy market which is being liberalised, there is a good cause for privatising nuclear power, moving away from the politicised decision-making of the past. Nuclear generators should be placed in a market in which they have to satisfy private shareholders and sell their product in competition with others. But the government’s proposals have serious weaknesses. By merging Nuclear Electric and Scottish Nuclear, they suppress competition in ideas and they fail to increase rivalry in the electricity generation sector as a whole. A better devised scheme, retaining two companies but making them more equal in size (and, of course, allowing them to diversify), would have helped correct a fundamental weakness of electricity privatisation – which shows up the ability of the major generators to set prices most of the time.

Pages: 36 pages
Date: 1996-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.som.surrey.ac.uk/seeds/SEEDS85.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sur:seedps:85

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Surrey Energy Economics Centre (SEEC), School of Economics Discussion Papers (SEEDS) from Surrey Energy Economics Centre (SEEC), School of Economics, University of Surrey Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mona Chitnis ().