» The nuclear industry doesn’t trust itself…Why should we?

November 18th, 2009

The nuclear industry doesn’t trust itself…Why should we?

Shawn Patrick Stensil

Why should we trust the nuclear industry when it doesn’t trust itself? That’s the underlining question of a Greenpeace report released this week.

The Harper government has tabled the Nuclear Liability and Compensation Act in Parliament. The bill would, if passed, artificially cap the liability of a nuclear operator for accidents at $650 million – a miniscule fraction of the likely actual cost of a nuclear disaster. Why?

Despite claiming publicly its reactors are safe, the nuclear industry needs this special protection – wind operators aren’t exempted from paying accident insurance – because private lenders, insurers and reactor vendors know that Chernobyl scale accidents are a realistic possibility. That is, the nuclear industry doesn’t have confidence in its reactors.

They know, but don’t like to admit publicly, that all current and proposed reactor designs are vulnerable to catastrophic radiation releases following an accident or terrorist attack. Industry studies show that the just the health costs for a catastrophic accident at the Pickering B nuclear station just east of Toronto would exceed $52 billion. Paying such debts, however, would bankrupt the industry.

So in order to operate the nuclear lobby convinces government to pay for the industry’s pollution in the even of a nuclear accident. Victims pay while nuclear polluters get paid.

The proposed $650 million dollar cap on operator liability for reactor accidents shifts to the responsibility for clean up of a nuclear accident from the those responsible (the nuclear industry) to the victims (the federal tax-payer). This creates a massive hidden public subsidy to the nuclear industry.

Greenpeace’s report estimates the impact of avoided insurance premiums permitted by the Harper government’s legislation equals a 5.4 to 11 cents a kilowatt hour subsidy to nuclear operators. Converted into dollars the subsidy would range from $4.8 billion to 9.7 billion annually.

Obviously such a massive subsidy – on top of all the other perks the nuclear industry gets – is a significant deterrent to the develop development of safer and more cost-effective green energy.

Despite all the claims made by nuclear lobbyists, this legislation shows one thing clearly: nuclear power is neither cheap nor safe.