A Different Take on Fukushima

funraniumlabs.com

23 points·baud147258··4 comments

Not so directly related to the story, but Fukushima has clarified my understanding of the risks of nuclear power.

The risk is to property directly, and not so much to human life. Usually there is enough warning for people to get away, but the contamination is extremely expensive to clean up, leading to exclusion zones.

https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...

The bottom line is that no sane insurance company will fully cover nuclear power operations. No other power source has this problem.

But there is insurance:

https://www.iii.org/article/insurance-coverage-nuclear-accid...

$13B does not seem enough, and taxpayers are supposed to pay any amount exceeding this.

> The risk is to property directly, and not so much to human life.

Exactly, both large swaths of land contaminated by low-grade radioactive material as well as the loss of the failed reactor/plant. Considering the high capital costs involved, any premature failure of a nuclear plant is devastating economically.

The original assumption was that failures would be extremely rare but the health costs associated with failures would be enormous; the opposite proved to be true.

Fiscal conservatives should be up in arms; not greens nor tech-utopians.

But they are rare, like once in twenty years

Several interesting points in that piece, but the one I was most struck by was the argument that reducing redundancy (“waste”) in emergency response services was demonstrably a bad idea when a crisis actually hits.

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