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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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NECX debut: Shaping the next era of energy
The sold-out inaugural Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX) got off to a roaring start in Atlanta, Ga., Tuesday morning with an opening plenary that was a live highlight reel discussing the latest industry achievements.
Starting with a lively promo video that left the audience amped up for Entergy’s CEO and NEI chair Drew Marsh, who welcomed everyone to the event, hosted jointly by the American Nuclear Society and the Nuclear Energy Institute. He spoke to a full house of more than 1,300 attendees, promising a blend of science, technology, policy, and advocacy centered around the future of nuclear energy.
Andrew G. Benson
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 6 | June 2022 | Pages 947-989
Technical Paper – Special section on the Nuclear, Humanities, and Social Science Nexus | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2021.1991762
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Lead time—the duration of construction and commissioning—is an important determinant of the capital cost of nuclear power plants (NPPs). For an industry dominated by a handful of multinational firms, the degree of cross-national variation is surprising. NPP lead times have historically trended upward over time in Western nations, and yet they are comparatively quick and stable in East Asia. I theorize that the institutional capacity and autonomy of subnational governments can partially explain these patterns in the data. Having assembled a novel data set on the design specifications of the global population of NPPs, I empirically document a positive association between political decentralization and NPP lead time that is not explained by observed cross-country differences in NPP design. The results are suggestive of the hypothesis that political decentralization creates conditions that slow NPP construction for nontechnical reasons. However, the findings are not robust to certain robustness checks and fail to rule out the possibility that unobserved differences in design explain this association.