nuclear-news

How USA’s nuclear industry stalled, despite government propping it up

There are many reasons those 896 reactors went missing. Number one is the fact that the No Nukes movement stopped the industry from gouging from the government the trillion or more dollars it would have taken to build that fleet.

Local and national public opposition slowed and cancelled many projects and created a political atmosphere in which it is impossible for the industry to do what was done in France. There the industry established a radioactive form of national socialism. It is amusing to watch American “free- market advocates” go rhapsodic about the French nuclear industry, when in fact it is owned, insured, operated, monitored, and regulated by the government.

Here the government doesn’t own the reactors, but it does own their liabilities. When atomic power was introduced, utilities refused to invest unless Congress would insulate them from the damage caused by an accident. So the Price-Anderson Act of 1957 required reactor owners to establish a pay-out pool of $540 million: the industry’s liability for an accident whose potential was estimated to be capable of destroying a land mass the size of Pennsylvania.

The protection has been periodically renewed by Congress. Today the pool has grown to $12.6 billion. As Fukushima has demonstrated, that’s a fraction of the potential damage from a disaster at one or more American reactors. Preliminary estimates of the cost for radioactive cleanup at Fukushima mean little, in part because they’re intertwined with destruction from quake and tsunami. And the accident is far from over. Radioactive emissions seem to be worsening, and five weeks after the earthquake the level of radioactive iodine 131 was 6,500 times the legal limit in the Pacific waters near the plant. Should such fallout occur from a U.S. reactor, beyond the $12.6 billion pool, liability would rest with the victims and the taxpayers……www.washingtonspectator.com

April 30, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, politics, USA