After graduating from RHS in 1971, I became an American Field Service exchange student to France. (Also in 1971, my father received his MA in mechanical engineering through the Center for Graduate Studies in Richland.) I passed the French baccalaureate in philosophy and mathematics in 1972, and I returned to the newly opened The Evergreen State College. There, I began my research on nuclear power economics, examining the proposed privatization of the uranium enrichment enterprise.
After graduating from college in 1975, I worked and took classes at universities before returning to France in 1977 to live in Nice. Between 1972 and 1977, France accelerated the construction of a fleet of nuclear power plants and a complete nuclear fuel cycle. I spent my time attending classes at the University of Nice and studying the organization of the French nuclear industry.
As a first-year graduate student at the University of California–Berkeley, I published a paper on the international uranium cartel that operated between 1972 and 1977. As an economics PhD student, I took qualifying exams in industrial organization and econometrics. As a law and economics master’s student, I took law courses at the UC Berkeley School of Law. My dissertation, Utility Power Plant Choice under Investment Regulation, investigated how cost uncertainty affected the choice between nuclear and fossil-fueled power plants.
After completing my PhD in 1985, I accepted a postdoctoral position at the California Institute of Technology. There, I wrote papers on the Price-Anderson Act. I created a probabilistic model of the cost of a nuclear power plant accident to determine an appropriate premium for accident insurance. This led to a field of literature in economics, as described in Appendix 3A of my book, Economics of Nuclear Power (2016, Routledge).
I followed a half dozen professors from Caltech to Stanford University, where I was employed from 1986 through 2012. During my tenure at Stanford in the Department of Economics and in the Public Policy Program, I wrote on (1) measuring nuclear power plant productivity; (2) estimating the cost of decommissioning nuclear facilities; (3) nuclear plant rate regulation, leading to my first book, Electricity Economics: Regulation and Deregulation, with Tomas Gómez, IEEE Press/John Wiley (2003), translated into Russian by the Russian Ministry of Energy as a training manual; (4) the organizational structure of nuclear power plant construction; (5) a real options approach to evaluating new nuclear power plants; (6) the use of nuclear energy to produce hydrogen and to desalinate water; (7) the optimal allocation of funding between advanced nuclear research and development; (8) the economics of uranium enrichment and nuclear fuel fabrication; and (9) a comparative institutional analysis of Fukushima.
Also, while at Stanford, I participated in the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) Committee on Decontamination and Decommissioning of the Uranium Enrichment Facilities (1993–1996) and Committee to Review U.S. Department of Energy’s Nuclear Energy R&D Program (2006 and 2007). I chaired the Committee on Methodology for Nuclear Power Plant Performance and Statistical Analysis at the International Atomic Energy Agency (1996–1997).
Perhaps more important were my roles as a member of the Subcommittee for Long Term Planning for Generation IV Research, Nuclear Energy Research Advisory Committee, Department of Energy (1999 and 2000); member of the Evaluation Methodologies Group (2001 and 2002) and technical director, Economics Crosscut Group (2002) of the Generation IV Roadmap Committee, U.S. DOE-NE; economics director of the Economics Modeling Working Group (EMWG) of the Generation IV International Forum (GIF) (2003–2013); and finally as the secretariat of the EMWG (2013–2018). EMWG’s primary product was the Cost Estimating Guidelines for Generation IV Nuclear Energy Systems, published in September 2007. (I am now consulting with the Clean Air Task Force, International Working Group on Fusion Cost Model Analysis, to apply the Cost Estimating Guidelines to fusion electricity production.)
In February 2013, I started working as the principal economist for the Nuclear Energy Agency of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris. My primary responsibilities included organizing meetings as the secretariat of the Working Party on Nuclear Energy Economics (WPNE) and the EMWG, as well as managing tasks recommended by the Committee for Economic Studies of Nuclear Energy. I also provided economic support to the NEA’s Radioactive Waste Management Committee (RWMC) and to the OECD’s International Energy Agency (IEA) on nuclear power economics.
Since I retired from the NEA in mid-2018, I have continued to work on the NASEM Committee to Review U.S. DOE-Environmental Management Program (2020–2022) and Committee to Review the Continued Analysis of Supplemental Treatment of Low-Activity Waste at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation (2021–2023), as well as on the Committee to Review l’Inventaire des Passifs Nucléaires, 2023, for the Agency for Radioactive Waste and Enriched Fissile Materials, Brussels, Belgium (Aug.–Dec. 2023).
I have a lifetime membership in the American Nuclear Society. I received my Silver Certificate in March 2019, signed by then ANS President John Kelly (2018–2019), a colleague from GIF. My last conversation with John was after a GIF meeting in Seoul, where we discussed whether the U.S. should import APR-1400s from South Korea if the U.S. NRC were to license them. Sadly, we lost John, still relatively young, in October 2024.
We welcome ANS members with long careers in the community to submit their own stories so that the personal history of nuclear power can be captured. For information on submitting your stories, contact nucnews@ans.org.
