Ok then let's repeal the Price-Anderson Nuclear indemninty act and make nuclear power plants liable for ALL clean up costs if something goes wrong.
For Fukushima that number is circa $800 billion.
If it is as safe as you think it is with a minimum of safety standards then the market will still provide. Sophisticated insurers will be capable of calculating the risk and shouldering all of it for a reasonable fee.
Right?
The act exists, of course, because it definitely isnt safe enough to do that and sophisticated private insurers who are capable of calculating risk better than you or I know this all too well. They won't touch nuclear power without a ludicrously low liability cap.
The ironic thing is that even with this gargantuan implicit subsidy (yes, taxpayer funded insurance that pays out $800 billion in an emergency is a big subsidy), nuclear power still isnt cost competitive with solar and wind.
But, I'm all in favor of letting nuclear plants determine their own safety levels. IF they can get the insurance to cover ALL the costs of dealing with a disaster. Free market, baby.
I know you're making a point but of course realistically, nuclear businesses would just try to structure themselves in such a way that in the event of a fallout the company can just go bankrupt without disrupting those benefitting from it majorly
What you describe is deliberate undercapitalization at the time of incorporation - this would lead to courts being able to pierce the corporate veil and hold directors personally liable for cleanup costs.
This wouldn't mean that the state would get the money back in such an eventuality, but it would mean director => prison.
What kind of person do you think you're going to get to run your nuclear plant if they know that there's a risk of prison if everything goes wrong? Either a very stupid one, a very, very risk averse one or no director at all.
This chain of thought combined with the state's strong desire to see a nuclear industry with a healthy supply chain in order to support the nuclear military is why the indemnity act exists at all. They know that nuclear power requires lavish subsidies like taxpayer backed insurance to even exist.
The natural objection is that the Fukushima response was a significant overreaction.
Counting that cost is like including Iraq war costs for oil usage (perhaps fair for the first gulf war, but the expense of the second was an independent policy mistake)
> The crux of the Fukushima costing is whether damage actually occurred to property.
The legal requirement would be if it caused land values to decline. It doesn't matter if that decline was for a reason you'd call irrational. It wouldn't even require proof of responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt; "preponderance of evidence" would be enough in the US system.
It’s fair to debate whether the nuclear activities caused the land value to decline or whether the government policy caused the land value to decline.
A government could impose irrational exclusion zones for arbitrary events, it’s unfair to impose the cost on the event itself unless the exclusion zone policy was justified.
I would say the risk tolerance with nuclear should be very low. It’s going to take one major disaster to ruin hundreds of thousands of square miles of land for the foreseeable future if something goes wrong.
For Fukushima that number is circa $800 billion.
If it is as safe as you think it is with a minimum of safety standards then the market will still provide. Sophisticated insurers will be capable of calculating the risk and shouldering all of it for a reasonable fee.
Right?
The act exists, of course, because it definitely isnt safe enough to do that and sophisticated private insurers who are capable of calculating risk better than you or I know this all too well. They won't touch nuclear power without a ludicrously low liability cap.
The ironic thing is that even with this gargantuan implicit subsidy (yes, taxpayer funded insurance that pays out $800 billion in an emergency is a big subsidy), nuclear power still isnt cost competitive with solar and wind.
But, I'm all in favor of letting nuclear plants determine their own safety levels. IF they can get the insurance to cover ALL the costs of dealing with a disaster. Free market, baby.