Replication Data for: Power to the People or Regulatory Ratcheting? Explaining the Success (or Failure) of Attempts to Site Commercial U.S. Nuclear Power Plants: 1954-1996

Between 1954 and 1996, more than 200 nuclear power projects were publicly announced in the USA. Barely half of these projects were completed and generated power commercially. Existing research has highlighted a number of potential explanations for the varying siting outcomes of these projects, including contentious political protest, socioeconomic, and political conditions within potential host communities, regulatory changes (‘ratcheting’), and cost overruns. However, questions remain about which of these factors, if any, had an impact on these outcomes. We created a new data set of 228 host communities where siting was attempted to illuminate the factors that led projects towards either completion or cancellation. We include county-level regulatory, reactor-specific, demographic, and political factors which may correlate with the outcomes of attempts to site nuclear reactors over this time period. Draft of forthcoming peer reviewed article in International Journal of Energy Research can be found at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2423935. We include the Stata dataset, the codebook, and the .do file used to create the statistical analysis for the paper.