Cost Escalation in Nuclear Power

This report is concerned with the escalation of capital costs of nuclear central station power plants between the early 1960s and the present. The report presents an historical overview of the development of the nuclear power industry and cost escalation in the industry, using existing data on orders and capital costs. New data are presented on regulatory delays in the licensing process, derived from a concurrent study being carried on in the Social Science group at Caltech. The conclusions of the study are that nuclear capital costs have escalated more rapidly than the GNP deflator or the construction industry price index. Prior to 1970, cost increases are related to bottleneck problems in the nuclear construction and supplying industries and the regulatory process; intervenors play only a minor role in cost escalation. After 1970, generic changes introduced into the licensing process by intervenors (including environmental impact reviews, antitrust reviews, more stringent safety standards) dominate the cost escalation picture, with bottlenecks of secondary importance. Recent increases in the time from application for a construction permit to commercial operation are related not only to intervenor actions, but also to suspensions, cancellations or postponements of construction by utilities due to unfavorable demand or financing conditions

A Class of Generalized Metzlerian Matrices

This paper returns to a problem concerning the relationship between dynamic stability and Hicksian stability raised in a paper by Lloyd Metzler over twenty-five years ago [10]. The present paper identifies-a class of matrices which has the property that dynamic stability implies Hicksian stability, as in the gross substitute or “Metzlerian” case. Further, as in the Metzlerian case, such matrices are specified in terms of their qualitative properties, i.e., their sign pattern configurations. Some links between this class of matrices and Samuelson’s correspondence principle are also indicated

Stadium Capacities and Attendance in Professional Sports

Over the past fifteen years, professional team sports has become an increasingly important part of our social and economic life. While in 1959there were just forty-two major league teams in five monopolistic leagues (AL, NL; NBA; NHL; NFL), by 1974 this had grown to 117 teams in eight major leagues (AL, NL; NBA, ABA; NHL, WHA; NFL, WFL). Accompanying this growth in professional team sports has been a wave of stadium construction, with new stadiums appearing in essentially every medium to large size city in the U.S. In contrast to stadiums in use in professional sports fifteen years ago, these new stadiums have two distinguishing features--with rare exceptions, they are publicly owned and they are multiple-use facilities, designed to accommodate several sports

The Simple Economics of Water

An economist explains the existing water rights to the Colorado River--and how they got that way

Synchronous gastric and duodenal metastases from head and neck squamous cell carcinoma: a unique presentation of upper gastrointestinal bleeding.

Metastatic disease to the stomach or duodenum is an infrequent diagnosis, and head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) is one of the least common primary malignancies that lead to gastric or duodenal metastases. We report the case of a 65-year-old man with human immunodeficiency virus infection and previously diagnosed HNSCC who presented with melena. The patient had a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy tube placed 3 months prior to his presentation. Laboratory testing was significant for normocytic anemia and a digital rectal examination was positive for melena. Esophagogastroduodenoscopy revealed numerous cratered nodules with contact bleeding in the stomach as well as the duodenum that appeared malignant. Biopsies of the gastric and duodenal nodules were positive for p40 and CK 5/6, consistent with metastatic squamous cell carcinoma

Water resource problems of energy projects in the Colorado River Basin

The successful development of western coal and oil shale deposits is dependent, to a significant degree, on the availability of adequate water supplies. EQL is involved in a study of the aggregate effects of various energy activities in the upper Colorado River Basin on downstream water quantity and quality. These activities will tend to reduce the available water in the river, and could increase its salinity, which is already so high as to interfere with downstream domestic and agricultural use

The Winner's Curse and Cost Estimation Bias in Pioneer Projects

Cost overruns are almost as massive and almost as pervasive on private "first of a kind" projects as on defense contracts. This paper examines the cost overrun problem in terms of the methodology of cost estimation, abstracting from moral hazard problems. The main results of the paper are these: first, if cost estimators are an unbiased estimation methodology, then under certain monotonicity conditions, this will produce an observed cost underestimation bias, because cost estimates are used as a guide to project decision making; second, the more uncertainty there is with respect to the costs of a project, the larger will be the observed cost underestimation bias, assuming the estimator uses an unbiased estimation methodology; third, in bottoms up estimation, the most accurate of cost estimation methodologies, there is a built in cost underestimation bias because the value of information is not incorporated into the cost estimate; fourth, the size of the underestimation bias in bottoms up estimation definitely-increases with uncertainty only under rather stringent conditions on the construction production function