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Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

There's nothing here about liability for nuclear accidents. Under the Price-Anderson Act, private insurance covers up to $450 million per plant. Collective self-insurance provides another $13 billion overall. And the US government may cover anything over that, pending congressional action.

Without that government-mandated system, and "guarantee", there would have been no commercial development in the US. Also, it's notable that this system covers both accidents and decommissioning.

I'd be a lot more comfortable with further nuclear development if worn-out plants had actually been decommissioned, and not just mothballed. And if there were a coherent plan for waste disposal.

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From what I understand, in the US, there is a coherent plan for nuclear waste disposal in Nevada. It's just politics that is stopping it.

OK, no coherent plan that's being implemented. And you can say "just politics", but what that means is that people don't trust the plan. I mean, consider the history of the Nevada Test Site. There's a "fool me once etc" vibe about this.

It's still just politics. If you've got nuclear waste not having a plan is the worst option. There's never going to be a perfect place to store waste because you have to store it for such a long period of time. The French encase the waste in glass and then put the glass blocks in granite.

I was just reading that the U.S. has a ban on recycling nuclear waste (proliferation concerns) while France and the U.K. and a few other nations commercialized recycling (Russia and others recycle for the military).

So apparently the politics behind Nevada is a bit more scewed.

Note that recycling appears to be a rather intensive process returning material that could be used for power production but is also not of superior quality.

Ultimately it will be "the people" (via the government) that end up paying for the proper decommissioning of a project anyway; so it makes sense for that cost to be paid in to a resource pool at that level where at least if the funds are raided "we did it to our selves".

The Hinckley Point plant in the UK will pay for its own decommissioning - and has to put money aside as it operates to fund it, so a later bankruptcy wouldn't affect the liability. Of course, it if was decommissioned after only a short period of operation, that wouldn't work.

Except the next generations can't time-travel snatch the current population:

Technically it can put aside money while it operates: this either makes it somewhat scarce now to the benefit of current capital holders, or this encourages injection of fresh money by the central banks.

Then if in a few generations away something goes wrong and the stash of money is released it devalues money by buying up labor manhours (thus making manhours scarcer for all the holders of capital in the future).

I don't get why the government (general public) ought to pay for decommissioning. Bankruptcy doesn't erase environmental liability (as with student loans). And consider Bernard Madoff, for example. Prosecutors did a decent job of clawing back funds from Madoff, his wife, and some arguably complicit "investors".

Because if they don’t, no such plants would ever get built. So the real question is do we want these plants or not?

Of course no is a perfectly viable answer, but so is yes.

Lots of other stuff gets built without such policies.

So why not nuclear plants that are safe enough to be viable without them?

The cost of decommissioning a plant is high, and spread out over a long period. It would be too easy for the capitalists to take the money and run, and the societal costs too high to leave it in their hands.

Maybe they'd be able to recover funds in court, that's an expensive lengthy process that doesn't address immediate concerns. And it further encourages the owners into more unsafe actions to try and hide any misdeeds.

Well yeah. But if governments will get stuck paying for decommissioning, they should just own the plants, and pay operators some fair management fee. It's just not fair to let firms profit, and then walk away.

Which would mean the government and tax payers paying the full up front investment and operating costs. The purpose of bringing in firms is to attract investment and give them an incentive to apply their technology and expertise. If you don’t want any of those things then sure, do it as a fully public sector project, but if you do then you have to at least offer the possibility of a profit.

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