Cursed forever? Exploring socio-economic effects of nuclear power plant closures across nine communities in the United States

Abstract

Nuclear energy occupies a conspicuous place in the global energy transition. In the United States, civilian nuclear power plants are shutting down before their licenses expire, leaving nuclear host communities struggling to cope with the unexpected change. This study focuses on the socio-economic dimensions of the effects of nuclear power plant shutdowns in nuclear host communities in the United States. Our study attempts to strike a balance between intensive case studies, which often fail to disentangle place-specific factors from broader trends and to put observations in perspective, and large-sample-based quantitative analyses, which seeks a general impact of decommissioning without paying sufficient attention to local variations. We adopt a quasi-experimental approach, which compares communities with decommissioned plants to their control neighbors, to assess the diverse trajectories of socio-economic well-being of nuclear host communities before and after plant closure. These communities are analyzed in terms of their population, per capita income, education, poverty levels, and unemployment. The findings provide a starting point from which more detailed case studies can be conducted, and nuclear host communities can better navigate the decommissioning process.