Reddit mentions of Agendas and Instability in American Politics, Second Edition (Chicago Studies in American Politics)

I wish I could recommend a book to you, but I'm no engineer. Consider asking /r/nuclear or /r/nuclearpower?

One chapter of one book I can recommend to you about the politics of the issue in the United States is "The Construction and Collapse of a Policy Monopoly" from Agendas and Instability in America Politics, 2nd edition, by Baumgartner and Jones. These political scientists adopted the concept of "punctuated equilibrium" from evolutionary biology to explain why sometimes issues will stay off the political agenda for many decades, allowing a policy to remain stable for that period, but then suddenly it will attract a lot of attention from politicians, the media, or the public, which leads to a sudden change in the policy. This chapters gives a textbook example of their model of agenda setting and policy change using nuclear power. It gives the story of how nuclear power started with very positive PR ("atoms for peace" and "electricity too cheap to meter") and how that changed. You'll learn why the AEC was replaced with DOE and NRC.

edit: i accidentally a word