Market deregulation and nuclear safety

Nuclear reactor initiating events, which are unplanned reactor emergency shutdowns, are a primary measure of reactor safety performance. We call attention to several methodological and data issues in the emerging research endeavor that uses nuclear initiating events to investigate the impacts of electricity market deregulation on nuclear reactors' safety performance. Correcting these issues we find that the effects of plant divestiture on nuclear safety are much smaller in magnitude and less significant. Moreover, we find that when examining data prior to 2008 or excluding years 2008 and 2009 from analysis, the effect of plant divestiture on reactor initiating events becomes robustly insignificant.