Statewise Correlates of Civil Nuclear Energy

Quantitative empirical analysis has been used in several works, over the past decade or so, to identify correlates of states motivation for pursuing military nuclear technology. Nelson and Sprecher used such methodology to identify various national attributes that correlate to states peaceful use of nuclear power for electricity generation, which was termed as \Nuclear Reliance." The major initial objective for the present work was to replace a dichotomous subjective independent variable used by Nelson and Sprecher to represent engagement in international commerce in civil nuclear technology with more objectively defined variables carrying a similar representation. Ordinary least squares stepwise regression was applied to a dataset consisting of 27 independent variables that was created for this study. Data for 13 of 27 independent variables were added to the dataset from previous study, and 9 of 14 previous attributes data were updated. Supervised stepwise regression was used to create a linear regression model with five predictors having acceptable confidence level (p < 0:01) and coefficient of determination (R^(2) ? 0:51). Results from stepwise linear regression showed that states that trade knowledge and material for nuclear power technology are heavily involved in civil nuclear power that states that are not involved in international trade of such technology and material. Analyses of the individual steps at several different levels of aggregation showed that some predictors were included as a consequence of improvements to residuals only for a few states. Preliminary results show that an analysis based on change from some prior year (1980 was used, for illustrative purposes) has considerable promise.