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Weaken safety standards, to save the industry – that’s the advice from pro nuclear lobbyists

Nuclear Power Is In Crisis As Cost Overruns Cripple Industry Giants, New Matilda.,  By Jim Green on February 26, 2017A future for nuclear power?

“……A fundamental difficulty for the nuclear industry is that the imperatives for greater safety and reduced costs push in opposite directions. Mark Cooper, from the Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School, recently told the New York Times: “Nuclear safety always undermines nuclear economics. Inherently, it’s a technology whose time never comes.”

Retreating from post-Fukushima efforts to strengthen safety standards inevitably increases the risk of another Chernobyl- or Fukushima-scale catastrophe. Leaving aside the disputed health effects from those disasters, the economic costs associated with both disasters was in the ball-park of US$500 billion, and both had devastating impacts on public acceptance of nuclear power.

Yet a retreat from post-Fukushima efforts to strengthen safety standards seems to be where the industry and its enthusiasts are heading in their efforts to curb nuclear power’s astonishing cost increases and overruns.

Proposals include weakening safety regulations; abandoning Generation 3/3+ reactors in favour of Generation 2 reactor types (or redefining Generation 2 reactor types as Generation 3/3+); and overturning the established scientific orthodoxy that even the smallest doses of ionizing radiation can cause morbidity and mortality.

How to convince the public to accept reduced nuclear safety standards even as 80,000 people remain displaced because of the Fukushima disaster and clean-up and compensation cost estimates double then double again? In a word: spin.

Shellenberger, for example, wants “higher social acceptance” but he also wants weakened safety regulations such as the repeal of a US Nuclear Regulatory Commission rule designed to strengthen reactors against aircraft strikes. He squares the circle with spin and sophistry, claiming (without evidence) that the NRC’s Aircraft Impact Rule “would not improve safety” and claiming (without evidence) that the NRC “caved in to demands” from anti-nuclear groups to establish the rule………. https://newmatilda.com/2017/02/26/nuclear-power-is-in-crisis-as-cost-overruns-cripple-industry-giants/

February 26, 2017 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA