Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

166Disasters Waiting to Happensmaller incentive to sabotage it than the radioactivity within it, cost are not negligible.The cost of replacement energy would be huge for a society that hadallowed itself to become dependent on energy from the damaged plant or fromothers shut down in the wake of the sabotage. The direct costs to the utilityconcerned can be crippling: just cleaning up Three Mile Island Two enough tobe able to decide whether to try to get it working again will cost General PublicUtilities a billion dollars–with the restoration to service, if this is even possible,not included. The extraordinary capital intensity of nuclear plants (new onestypically will cost several billion dollars each) represents a risk to large blocksof invested capital, as Three Mile Island investors have discovered. Few if anyutilities in the world have enough financial safety margin to absorb such a risk,and as Three Mile Island has again demonstrated, institutional preparednessfor a multi-billion-dollar loss is also woefully inadequate.America’s capital structure is already at risk because many utilities areinsolvent. Their debt and equity–the largest single block of paper assets in thewhole economy–is the basis of many highly leveraged institutions. 179 Utilityfinance, and hence capital markets generally, are currently so precarious–andlikely to remain so for many years–that another major loss could trigger cascadingbankruptcies on a wholly unmanageable scale. The potential economicconsequences of losing a major nuclear asset thus go well beyond a particularutility or its rate-payers or investors. Further, the financial communityalready perceives substantial risk associated with utility investments in generaland nuclear power investments in particular. 180 Any long-term prospects fornuclear finance which may have survived Three Mile Island would certainlynot survive a major episode of sabotage anywhere in the world.Psychological and social impactsConsequences measured at the crude level of death, disease, land denial,and economic cost may be less important to society than psychologicalimpacts. 181 Whether nuclear sabotage is technically successful or not may evenbe less important than whether people think it may succeed. The psychologicalimpact of a potential release was strikingly confirmed even before ThreeMile Island. In Denmark in 1973, a War-of-the-Worlds-type radio dramadescribed a supposed 1982 meltdown in the Bärseback reactor in Sweden (visibleacross the narrow straits from Copenhagen), allegedly sending an invisiblebut deadly plume towards the Danish capital. Residents panicked; somebegan to flee; some thought their loved ones were dead; and it took hours ofrepeated assurances that it was all fictitious before people got the message. 182Since “large numbers of people in many countries have become acutely