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> Makes me feel really safe, knowing that as a taxpayer Im forced to be on the hook for all clean up costs over $300 million.

If it's any consolation, you're already on the hook for oil/gas cleanup, which is significantly more expensive.

Texas has an estimated 1 Trillion dollars in damages from our Oil craze. Whoops... And, certainly the likes of Chevron won't be paying that.



That's roughly the same scale as Fukushima which has 81 Trillion Yen or .6 Trillion dollars as one estimate.

Like the construction costs in the article the cleanup costs estimates rise over time.


> If it's any consolation, you're already on the hook for oil/gas cleanup, which is significantly more expensive.

It is not even close. Deepwater horizon cost ~65B to clean up. The estimate from 2016 for Fukushima is $200B with organizations producing estimates up in the trillions.

So it is great that we phase out both oil/gas and nuclear and only rely on technologies which pay for the externalities and accidents.


It just makes me feel even more like the carbon and nuclear industries are two coddled peas in a pod.


The difference is that nuclear has comparatively far less damage and has taken orders of magnitude less lives, however we treat it like it's radioactive. We have absolutely no issue drilling or fracking.


>We have absolutely no issue drilling or fracking

We do take issue with that though.


Not from a legislative perspective, no. Those are extremely privileged methods of resource collection, and typically the companies who cause damage do not pay for the cleanup. We just call it a superfund site and then spend taxpayer dollars for the next 50 years trying to get it to a slightly less poisonous state.


That's not "we" that's the same legislative "them" that lavish taxpayer subsidies on nuclear power plants and shift 99.5% of the nuclear accident cleanup liability on to the taxpayer.

They're just as keen on nuclear power for military reasons as they are keen on supporting carbon industries because of money and lobbyists.




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