Conclusion and Implications

Not all new goods, however, have adopted, presumably because consumers judged that they would not be better off with the consumption of the new good relative to the consumption of the pre-existing good. Among passenger cars, the Ford Edsel and Chevy Corvaire were major flops. Also, early prospects for nuclear power were good, but major and persistent resistance developed in developing countries to the use of electricity generated nuclear power (Grübler,1996). This resistance has carried over to irradiated meat and poultry (Fox et al). The two nuclear examples are somewhat surprising because it is generally cheaper (financially and environmentally) to produce electricity by nuclear power than by coal or oil fired generating plants. Irradiated pork and other meats are free from harmful bacteria. The good attributes not withstanding, these goods have not been able to overcome the bad negative image of nuclear energy created by environmental groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. In the United States, these groups helped increase the public’s risk perception of nuclear power, forcing stringent safety standards to be enacted that contributed to a quadrupling of plant costs in just more than a decade (Ruttan, 2001). No new nuclear power plants have been ordered in the United States since 1978.