Nuclear power: heads you pay, tails you pay
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007Nuclear power is losing some of the stink it acquired in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster and the Three Mile Island accident. This rehabilitation is undeserved.
Most people I talk to are unaware of the fact that nuclear plant operators enjoy a fat subsidy from the public. In a real free market they would have to buy liability insurance like every other power plant operator, indeed, like every other business. But this isn’t a free market and nuclear power gets a special break, courtesy of the Price-Anderson Act of 1957. Price-Anderson sets a ceiling on the total damages that the nuclear industry’s insurance pool must pay in the event of an accident. The current value of the pool is roughly $12 billion, which sounds like a lot unless you know that the potential damage from a catastrophic nuclear accident is 50 times that.
A 1982 Sandia National Laboratories study, leaked to Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), quantified the consequences of a catastrophic nuclear power accident in the U.S. Besides potentially causing thousands of early deaths and cancers, an accident could cause as much as $313 billion in damages, or about $600 billion today with inflation. The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident has cost Ukraine, Belarus and southern Russia an estimated $350 billion.
If you enjoyed paying for Hurricate Katrina relief, you’ll love getting the bill for the next nuclear disaster.
