Soon it will be time to start talking about the costs of the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, and the potential costs of a comparable accident here.
If there were such an accident in the U.S., we would learn more about the real costs of nuclear power and the enormous financial concessions the industry has gotten from our government. We would learn, for example, that most of the cost of that accident would fall on us as taxpayers.
If there were a total meltdown at the Vermont Yankee plant near Brattleboro, most people in the affected area (which depends on wind direction, among other things) would survive physically in the immediate aftermath. (Notice how Japanese authorities talk about “immediate” effects on human health; that’s a hedging expression.) Long-term health problems and property damage that could leave thousands homeless are another story. No property insurer covers nuclear accidents. What would come into operation is a 1957 federal law, the Price-Anderson Act.
Originally passed as a temporary measure to make commercial nuclear power financially viable until it could qualify for private insurance, Price-Anderson, like tolls on the Mass Pike, is one of those annoyances that survived long after its originators assumed it would be gone. Under Price-Anderson, in the event of a severe accident, nuclear utilities would have to pay a per-reactor fee in the millions of dollars that would now amount to about $12.6 billion total.
But the NRC has estimated the cost of a worst-case accident at $300 billion—the remainder above $12.6 billion to be paid by us, the taxpayers. That’s what it takes on the insurance side to keep nuclear power in business, and the catastrophe in Japan won’t make it look any better to private insurers.
So the ugly paradox of nuclear insurance is that if you sue for reimbursement for health and property damage, you’re suing, in effect, yourself and other taxpayers. The rules governing the subsidies for nuclear power are like that: full of paradoxes. For example, there’s a special federal insurance called “standby support” to compensate developers of nuclear plants for delays caused by regulatory processes or suits. That means that if citizens contest aspects of the permitting of a nuclear plant, by the very act of doing so, they may be costing themselves and other taxpayers money through this taxpayer-backed insurance plan.
Heads, the industry wins; tails, the taxpayers lose. When a melting reactor core cools back down, the problems aren’t over. They’re just beginning.
