Jointly Owned Nuclear Operating Company

The partnership type described is the "Jointly Owned Nuclear Operating Company" or JNOC. In JNOCs, "coequal" partners form a partnership entity to manage operations and maintenance activities for several nuclear power plants. Using our vocabulary from Chapter 16, this is an example of a one-to-one, horizontal partnership combination. This chapter raises issues regarding top management and fxmctional support addressed in Chapters 11 and 12. It also addresses the problems of cost documentation and savings sharing covered in Chapter 25. 

Significant recent efforts have gone into attempting to form Jointly-Owned Nuclear Operating Companies (JNOCs), but none have yet been successfully established. Some of the key reasons for failure are presented in this chapter. The reasons also pose considerations that must be addressed in order to establish a JNOC successfully. This chapter deals only with JNOCs that pool a number of different owners plants for O M purposes, but where ownership is retained by each utility. 

The concept of cost sharing and transferring "lessons learned"/expertise is intuitively sound and should be very appealing to nuclear plant owner utilities. Why then have virtually none of these jointly owned nuclear operating companies been formed Three areas stand out as the main barriers ... 

Most recently, PECO Energy and Commonwealth Edison s parent company Unicom announced plans to merge. Once finalized the nearly 32 billion deal will mean that the new company will own and operate 14 nuclear units...not counting AmerGen-PECO Energy s joint venture with British Energy—that is in the process of purchasing six additional nuclear units so far. 

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