Is the Marble Canyon Project Economically Justified?

After many hundreds of pages of testimony and several economic studies, there still appears to be considerable uncertainty as to the economic merits of the controversial proposed Marble Canyon Project on the Colorado River just above Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona. This controversy is of importance not only to the conservationists, who are the principal opponents of the Project, but also to the nuclear power industry since nuclear power provides one of the principal alternatives. Demonstration that such an alternative is preferable to the Project would raise many questions as to the economic justification of other proposed hydroelectric projects, a major competing source of power. The purpose of this paper is to review the earlier studies of the question and to present some new and more refined cost-benefit calculations on the Project.