Corporate profit and nuclear safety2004

"Northeast Utilities Company adopted an ambitious new competitive strategy in the mid-1980s, seeking to become the low-cost supplier in New England electric power markets bracing for deregulation. Given its high-cost nuclear facilities, doing so required a corporate turnaround. For a decade Northeast faced increasing public and employee resistance to cost cutting at its nuclear plants. Though management achieved many of its goals, curtailing outlays on nuclear operations meant high risk that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would close the plants because of frequent, prolonged outages. This is just what happened in 1996." "Paul MacAvoy and Jean Rosenthal describe ten years of corporate performance preceding the shutdown, detailing the aggressive executive decisions, mounting regulatory actions in response to increasingly severe operational failures, and - at the same time - overall improvement in corporate earnings, stock prices, and executive pay packages. They relate the complexities of managing declining nuclear plant operations under ever more pressing budgetary targets. Their discussion of the increasing risk of outages raises the issue of the tradeoff of profit and conservative management of hazard operations."--BOOK JACKET.