Practically too. The $800 billion clean up bill also comes on top of the already gargantuan cost of building and maintaining nuclear power stations. It's a roll of the dice.
The next nuclear catastrophe probably won't look like Fukushima or Chernobyl but I imagine it will happen partly as a result of skimped/badly done maintenance on a plant whose operating life has been extended a bit too far.
Uh... We've seen that the cost of building, maintaining and decomissioning a 70s plant is around $6 billion ($4B + $1B + $1B approx) because this is something we've actually done.
Separately, that $800B cleanup cost is something some dude pulled out of his arse. The actual latest government estimate was $200B.
Which is almost entirely due to the radiation panic. For example the permanent evacuation (and subsequent need to compensate everyone driven out of their homes) was almost entirely of people in areas were they had aless that 1% extra risk of cancer. And the managers of the decontamination do things like spend years dithering over whether to just release a bunch of contaminated water which would increase locals yearly radiation exposure by under 0.04%.
But lets take those costs as a given. The developed world has around a hundred commercial nuclear reactors and has done so for more around 50 years. The vast majority of disaster cleanup is Fukushima. An extra $2B factored into the cost of each plant to deal with accident chance chance isn't going to break the bank given these things produce around 500B kWh during their life time, which sells on the electricity market for around $50B.
It really does. If you remove the free insurance and let the plants shoulder the full cost it renders an already extremely expensive enterprise completely financially unviable. Thats why governments gave liability indemnification to plants in the first place.
The $800 billion is about more than cleanup costs, fwiw. It also includes stuff like turning on coal power plants to replace the power produced by the dead reactor. It wasnt Japan "overreacting".
All of this has happened before and it will happen again and because appropriately priced insurance WOULD break the bank taxpayers will be on the hook next time. Again.
The latest nuclear bill in America focused entirely on extending the legal lifetime of existing nuclear power plants. Good thing Fukushima's demise wasn't about its age, eh?
> whose operating life has been extended a bit too far.
That's pretty much Fukushima. It was an old plant, older than Chernobyl by 6 years by date of commissioning. It was supposed to shut down in early 2011, but was granted an eleventh-hour 10-year extension in February that year. The earthquake and tsunami happened a month later, in March.
Granted, it probably wouldn't actually have made any difference as it would have been operating that specific month, but it was still a bit of a "he was only 2 weeks from retirement" moment. Unless actions like moving the backup generators uphill would have been done beforehand if it was known the plant was going to keep going until 2021.
The next nuclear catastrophe probably won't look like Fukushima or Chernobyl but I imagine it will happen partly as a result of skimped/badly done maintenance on a plant whose operating life has been extended a bit too far.