Institute of Nuclear Power Operations

The Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO) is an industry-funded organization created in the United States after the Three Mile Island accident to promote operational excellence and share safety information among nuclear utilities. INPO operates as a private regulatory body with the unusual power to effectively shut down plants that fail to meet its standards — a power that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not always possess due to legal and political constraints. INPO's creation represents an important but under-theorized phenomenon: the delegation of regulatory authority to private organizations when public institutions are perceived as too slow, too captured, or too politically constrained to enforce standards. Whether this represents regulatory capture by another name, or a genuine innovation in safety governance, remains debated.