Understanding political institutional support for completing the Mochovce nuclear power plant

Completion of the Slovak Mochovce nuclear power plant (NPP) is expected around 2020, almost forty years after its start. This is an overview of the project's political and policy background. It identifies how the government supported the project, and evaluates the democratic legitimacy of that support. The analysis draws on and summarises a large data set and other information, gathered from a wide range of official and academic sources, press agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). The results show that the Slovak authorities applied significant institutional political pressure to promote the project, and supported its completion by circumventing the legal rights of NGOs to transparency and participation in project permit procedures. The results also explain the context and rationale of measures used to limit the contributions from the Mochovce NPP operation to the Nuclear Decommissioning Fund, and also used to shift part of nuclear decommissioning costs from industry and government onto consumers of non-nuclear generated electricity. In the conclusion the key results are reviewed in the context of institutional recreancy and the theory and practise of regulatory capture.