I was reading about insurance coverage in the nuclear power industry in The Japan Times. The story deals with the industry not just in Japan alone, but world-wide.
So what is the coverage like?
Well, there isn't any.
No insurance coverage. It would cost too much, so the governments involved made a decision to have no insurance in order to have cheap power: a subsidy to the nuclear power industry. (I wish I had invested in nuclear energy!)
So who pays when things go wrong? (And they go wrong now on the average of once every ten years.) The State does; or, in other words, the taxpayers.
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110423a2.html
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Nuke insurance said too costly
Most plants have hardly any coverage
AP
BERLIN — From the U.S. to Japan, it’s illegal to drive a car without sufficient insurance, yet governments have chosen to run the world’s 443 nuclear power plants with hardly any insurance coverage whatsoever.So let us remember when it comes time to discuss Nuclear Power or drilling or strip mining or grubbing after the last hydrocarbon available, accidents are extremely costly and we shall pay for them. Major problems occur once a decade, based on Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima: three in thirty years. (And this does not even address nuclear waste.)
The Fukushima No. 1 nuclear disaster, which will leave taxpayers with a massive bill, highlights one of the industry’s key weaknesses — that nuclear power is a viable source for cheap energy only if plants go uninsured. The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., had no disaster insurance.
Governments that use nuclear energy are torn between the benefit of low-cost electricity and the risk of a nuclear catastrophe, which could total trillions of dollars and even bankrupt a country...
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2 comments:
Japan still struggle from this nuclear crisis. The rally has a point but japan relied on this power plants for their top class technology on the past years. instead of closing these power plants, people should give a chance of improving them so that the disaster will not happen again.
It makes sense to retire plants and build new and.or improved. However, what struck me is the fact that all these years, I never knew that a major cost was totally ignored, instead it was to be "socialized", i.e., it was to be born by society, as if we had been shareholders in the power company.
That dollar amount was and is a true cost of nuclear power which was "hidden" in a sense.
When one adds this enormous cost in at a probability that once every ten years a major problem happens - and includes real costs for the maintenance of spent nuclear fuel - the cost of energy sky rockets.
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