It’s really telling when former Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner, Gregory Jackzo, goes so far as to say that all U.S. nuclear facilities ought to be”phased out” because regulators aren’t doing their job.
“The next accident is going to be something that no one
predicted. At a certain point you have to review the fundamental
problem…that evaluation tells you you can’t rule out a severe accident.”
And he is isn’t alone in that belief, which is echoed by another former commissioner, Victor Gilinsky, who cites the NRC’s recent decisions not to immediately and fully implement the recommendations of ASME, (The American Society of Mechanical Engineers) for reforms in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.
Such a vote of non-confidence from people with the inside track should raise general alarm, at least amongst those Americans who live within fifty miles of a nuclear power plant…and that is a considerable number of folks.
Fifty miles is the currently accepted immediate evacuation radius in the event of a nuclear emergency; but that radius doesn’t even begin to cover the longer-term impacts should it not be possible to bring the emergency under full control in a timely manner.
That such a thing can happen is no longer just speculation, as the untenable situation at Fukushima attests.
Contamination continues to flow, only partially checked, from the crippled facilities and no one honestly knows when or how it will be brought under control.
Compounding all of this regulatory recklessness, and perhaps even encouraging it (since the NRC is historically captive to the industry) is the fact that, thanks to the Price-Anderson Act, owners of American nuclear power plants enjoy relatively little real liability in the event of disaster.
Enacted in the late 1950’s to facilitate development of a fledgling peacetime use for nuclear power, Price-Anderson has long been the invisible financial prop that allowed the industry to claim its product as “affordable.”
This is simple corporate welfare of the most egregious kind, since it plays with public safety and does so on the grandest scale.
Surely, the very least lesson the U.S. should have learned from Fukushima is that Price-Anderson must be repealed and the nuclear industry required to secure full liability for even the worst-case scenario. Were that to happen, there is no question that the entire fleet would be retired in short order, because no insurer would take on such a liability.
to have had a revelation after becoming the former NRC Chairman.
Price Anderson is far worse than just “corporate welfare.” It’s really a significant incentive for the industry to ignore the safety implications of its own decisions. Consider the following:
1) Fukushima will cost TEPCO more than it made during its entire 40 years of operation. If you were in the power business, would you evaluate your investment in a technology differently if you knew that no insurance company would cover you and that you were, in fact, betting the whole company’s future on the decision to “go nuclear?”
2) In the same vein, consider the industry’s current resistance to filtered vents. Correct me if I’m mistaken, but none of the resistance to this has anything to do with the basic technology. In other words, everyone agrees that filtering vents would mean less radiation released in the event of an accident. The whole argument, then, is the usual one: the industry says that such events are so rare that the investment in filters is not worthwhile. Raise your hand if you think that the industry’s knowledge that someone else will foot the bill if the event materializes has no effect on their judgment.
Indeed, raise your hand if you think the industry would not have installed filtered vents on GE Mark I nukes back in the 70s when the issue of the containment’s inadequate design was first exposed. The reason we’ve gone almost 40 years without these vents is that the regulators couldn’t be bothered to rouse themselves and the industry had no incentive to spend money which would never be recovered for a risk they were not going to bear anyway.
3) Of course, what I’ve just said about filtered vents applies to EVERY issue concerning nuclear safety. Forget the NRC (you might as well anyway – they’re largely irrelevant). The fact of the matter is simply this: if the industry knew that IT alone would bear all of the risks for every safety decision, those decisions would be made differently as a prudent business matter. I’m not talking about morality; I’m talking about good business practices.
4) In other words, Price Anderson provides the industry not only a subsidy which it doesn’t need, but perversely, the particular form of the subsidy – namely accident insurance – reshapes business judgments about safety issues by allowing nuclear executives to divorce their companies from the safety consequences of their decisions. Even executives who sincerely believe in the technology and believe they are performing a service to society and the environment by operating cannot help but be subtly influenced in their decisions by the knowledge that Price Anderson is there to absolve them of the costs of making a mistake.
Price Anderson is REALLY perverse, and far worse, for example, than federal loan guarantees (bad as they are as well) of comparable magnitude.