Fukushima and the institutional invisibility of nuclear disaster John Downer ~ Ecologist ~ December 20, 2014 If the owners and operators of nuclear reactors had to face the full liability of a Fukushima-style nuclear accident or go head-to-head with alternatives in a truly competitive marketplace, unfettered by subsidies, no one would have built a nuclear reactor in the past, no one would build one today, and anyone who owns a reactor would exit the nuclear business as quickly as possible. Mark Cooper Then there is an array of indirect costs that arise from externalities, such as the loss of assets like farmland and industrial facilities; the loss of energy from the plant and those around it; the impact of the accident on tourism; and so forth. The exact economic impact of a nuclear accident is almost as difficult to estimate as its mortality, and projections differ for the same fundamental reasons. The evacuation zone around Fukushima - an area of around 966 sq km, much of which will be uninhabitable for generations - covers 3% of Japan, a densely populated and mountainous country where only 20% of the land is habitable in the first place. They do not differ to the same degree, however, and in contrast to Fukushimas mortality there is little contention that its financial costs will be enormous. By November of 2013, the Japanese government had already allocated over 8 trillion yen (roughly $80 billion or £47 billion) to Fukushimas clean-up alone - a figure that excluded the cost of decommissioning the six reactors, a process expected to take decades and cost tens of billions of dollars. Independent experts have estimated the clean-up cost to be in the region of $500 billion (Gunderson & Caldicott 2012). These estimates, moreover, exclude most of the indirect costs outlined above, such as the disasters costs to food and agriculture industries, which the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestries and Fisheries (MAFF) has estimated to be 2,384.1 billion yen (roughly $24 billion). Of these competing estimates, the higher numbers seem more plausible. The notoriously conservative report of the Chernobyl Forum estimated that the cost of that accident had already mounted to hundreds of billions of dollars after just 20 years, and it seems unlikely that Fukushimas three meltdowns could cost less. theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2684383/fukushima_and_the_institutional_invisibility_of_nuclear_disaster.html
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 21:35:29 +0000
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