[spacebanana7]

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)

[1] (least bad Forbes article I’ve read in years) https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/11...

[pfdietz]

Destruction of property value by an accident is a real cause for legal action even if you consider it irrational.

Shellenberger is not a credible source. He's the person who assured us PV is bad because it uses rare earth elements (it does not.)

[spacebanana7]

Thanks for the info about Shellenberger.

The crux of the Fukushima costing is whether damage actually occurred to property.

In much of the exclusion zone radiation levels are relatively low, and always have been.

The decision to impose the exclusion zone was deeply political.

Here’s an NYT source for better credibility.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240306192358/https://www.nytim...

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/22/science/when-radiation-is...

[pfdietz]

> 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.

[spacebanana7]

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.

[pfdietz]

The decline in land value wouldn't be from government policy, it would be from people not wanting to live on land contaminated with sufficient radioactivity. If anything, government policy would be driven by this public sentiment, not the other way around.

I suggest trying to change this is not going to go well; "radiation isn't really bad, trust us, some meltdowns are ok" would be a very challenging PR move.