Nuclear Energy

was the Vice-President of the USA): without the security of the Price Anderson Act, “nobody’s
going to invest in nuclear power plants.” ccxxxvii
The way the Act works, it does not mean that the victims of a nuclear accident automatically
get their health costs reimbursed. As we have mentioned in Chapter 3, the US government refused
to acknowledge that there was any significant radiation release from the Three Mile Accident, told
the victims that their health problems were pure imagination, and denied them any compensation.
The victims had to go to court, and as normally happens when ordinary people fight giant
corporations, the case went on and on, and eventually they got tired and settled out of court.
A similar regime capping the maximum liability to be paid by nuclear plant operators exists
in every country in the world having nuclear reactors. For instance, in countries of the European
Union which are signatories to the Vienna or Paris international convention on nuclear liability, this
is now at the most 700 million euros. Worse, no liability regime now in effect outside the USA
provides more than $2 billion in aggregate cover, despite the large populations surrounding many of
these plants. ccxxxviii
4. Nationalisation of Waste Management Costs
As it is, the cost of storing the highly radioactive waste generated by nuclear power plants is
huge. On top of it, the very fact that this waste is intensely radioactive and is going to remain so for
thousands of years leads to additional liabilities: one, the waste is bound to inevitably leak and
contaminate the surrounding area, as discussed in an earlier chapter; and two: an accident or a
terrorist attack at the waste storage site could have catastrophic consequences, much worse than a
meltdown at a nuclear reactor. ccxxxix
No private firm, howsoever big it may be, has the financial capacity to bear these risks. And
so, national governments have stepped in and effectively nationalized both the financial costs and
accident liability risks of waste management. Just like the insurance subsidy discussed above,
without this subsidy too, it is doubtful if the nuclear power industry would have developed at all.
In the US, the government through the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act has taken over the
entire responsibility for permanently disposing off the nuclear waste generated by nuclear power
plants, in return for which pay the utilities pay an artificially low flat fee of 0.1 cents per kilowatt-
hour of nuclear generated electricity. ccxl It is not known how this amount was arrived at; it is not
based on actual experience as no long-term fuel disposal facilities exist anywhere in the world; but
it is obvious that it is a huge underestimate, in other words, a huge subsidy. To get a rough idea of
this subsidy amount, here are some statistics: as of 2009, the nuclear power companies had paid a
total of $16 billion for waste disposal services ccxli ; whereas the US Department of Energy estimated
that the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository was going to cost at least $96.2 billion ccxlii ; the
Obama government abandoned the project in 2010 ccxliii , but by then more than $13.5 billion had
already been spent on the project. ccxliv
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