Nuclear strongPowerstrong Reactors A Study in Technological Lock-in.pdf

Nuclear Power Reactors: A Study in Technological Lock-in Author(s): Robin Cowan Source: The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Sep., 1990), pp. 541-567 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Economic History Association Stable URL: /stable/2122817 Accessed: 08/09/2008 09:15 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTORs Terms and Conditions of Use, available at /page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTORs Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at /action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@. Nuclear Power Reactors: A Study in Technological Lock-in ROBIN COWAN Recent theory has predictedthat if competingtechnologies operate under dy- namic increasing returns, one, possibly inferior, technology will dominate the market.The historyof nuclearpowertechnologyis usedto illustrate the