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- All Subjects: Environmental Studies
- All Subjects: Energy policy
- Creators: Hirt, Paul W.
- Status: Published
In this paper, I analyze the reluctance of expanding nuclear power in the United States. This is done by exploring the history of nuclear power and using two conceptual theories to guide this analysis. The impact of nuclear accidents throughout history allows individuals to perceive risks as greater than they are while potentially ignoring the benefits of this energy method. By looking at the perception of risk through the Psychometric Theory of Risk, one can understand hesitance at a more individual level for perceived risk, knowledge, and trust. From there, one can look at more of a macro level with the Social Amplification of Risk Framework (SARF) to see what the psychometric paradigm may forget and view the ripple effects of media coverage and their effects on the perception of nuclear energy.
Infrastructure is not static, but dynamic. Institutions play a significant role in designing, building, maintaining, and upgrading dynamic infrastructures. Institutions create the appearance of infrastructure stability while dynamically changing infrastructures over time, which is resilience work. The resilience work of different institutions and organizations sustains, recovers, adapts, reconfigures, and transforms the physical structure on short, medium, and long temporal scales.
To better understand and analyze the dynamics of sociotechnical infrastructure resilience, this research examines several case studies. The first is the social and institutional arrangements for the allocation of resources from Hoover Dam. This research uses an institutional analysis framework and draws on the institutional landscape of water and energy systems in Arizona. In particular, this research illustrates how institutions contribute to differing resilience work at temporal scales while fabricating three types of institutional threads: lateral, vertical, and longitudinal threads.
This research also highlights the importance of institutional interdependence as a critical challenge for improving infrastructure resilience. Institutional changes in one system can disrupt other systems’ performance. The research examines this through case studies that explore how changes to water governance impact the energy system in Arizona. Groundwater regulations affect the operation of thermoelectric power plants which withdraw groundwater for cooling. Generation turbines, droughts, and water governance are all intertwined via institutions in Arizona.
This research, finally, expands and applies the interdependence perspective to a case study of forest management in Arizona. In a nutshell, the perilous combination of chronic droughts and the engineering resilience perspective jeopardizes urban water and energy systems. Wildfires caused by dense forests have legitimized an institutional transition, from thickening forests to thinning trees in Arizona.