If nuclear power can't stand on its own after 44 years, when will it?

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sun, 02 Dec 2001 10:48:30 GMT
FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED NOV. 30, 2001
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
If nuclear power can't stand on its own after 44 years, when will it?

Why do motorcycles have carburetors?

The earliest machines used open pans of gasoline -- the vapors rising from the open fuel source were vacuumed into the cylinder and ignited by the spark plug, powering the engine. But of course this was dangerous -- the fuel sloshed about, fires were common, and the likelihood that any insurer would have issued a policy underwriting the rider's safety was far-fetched.

Manufacturers knew they had to come up with a safer and more reliable arrangement -- and the race to develop the enclosed carburetor was on.

Today, exploding motorcycle engines are not a big problem.

But imagine for a moment that the U.S. Congress had intervened. After all, motorcycles are useful to the military. If the early motorcycle manufacturers had enjoyed better political connections, they might have asked Congress to pass a law sharply limiting their liability in the case of fires from those primitive engines. Should anyone suffer a truly serious injury, Congress would step in and pay the bill. The manufacturers would have been able to continue making their bikes the old-fashioned way -- and they'd still be blowing up with regularity.

The problem isn't just theoretical. Government interventions really do distort the free market. The Price-Anderson Act was enacted in 1957 and has been renewed three times since -- it will expire Aug. 1, 2002 unless the Senate joins in renewing it again, as the House voted to do Tuesday.

The law was specifically created to help the fledgling nuclear power industry bypass private insurers who wanted prohibitively high premiums to indemnify manufacturers and operators against liability claims which might result from a meltdown -- assuming they'd insure them at all. The odds of such an event were extremely difficult to calculate, given that no one had a baseline of experience with commercial reactors -- though everyone understood the liability could potentially be huge, as was seen at Chernobyl.

So Congress simply waved its magic wand, and said any damages above $9.5 billion -- which sounds like a lot but could actually boil down to a settlement of only $100,000 per victim should 95,000 people die, including property damage -- would be paid by Congress, which is to say the taxpayers.

Taxpayers are thus on the hook to pay any damages beyond the "deductible," as it were, and the way was cleared to build commercial reactors.

With the insurers thus indemnified, no one bothered to investigate the potential liability should all the spent fuel rods end up stored "on site" for the next 100,000 years. The precedent having been set, it was simply assumed Congress could and would step in to wave its magic wand yet again ... as it soon will, mandating that all that nuclear waste should be buried in Nevada, whether the locals like it or not.

The Price-Anderson renewal was brought to the house floor Tuesday under guidelines which limit debate and bar amendments. Why? That is a method more commonly used to speed through non-controversial measures "like renaming post offices and federal buildings," points out Jill Lancelot, legislative director for the watchdog group Common Sense. Yet "There is nothing more controversial than limiting liability protection for a politically powerful industry at the expense of taxpayers."

At least when they subsidize Conrail or Amtrak they make the operators "cross their heart and promise" to work toward standing on their own eventually. Why no deadline for the nukes? Wouldn't this be a good time for the Congress to subpoena witnesses from the insurance industry and ask them -- given the track record of the past 40 years -- whether this warping of the market is still required?

What would private insurance premiums now cost, if this federal cloaking device were turned off? Would the private insurance firms require plant operators to have signed, ironclad waste disposal contracts with willing storage facilities or reprocessing plants before allowing them to continue operation?

One need not be "against" nuclear power to say it should stand on its own two feet in competition with other methods of power generation, any more than one is "against" the airline industry to point out that security there would be reformed far more convincingly if each airline were free to try its own solution -- with the final arbiter being the independent insurance actuaries setting their liability rates, absent any federal "bailout."

That's how the free market works.

Dirigibles had trouble competing with fixed-wing aircraft after the Hindenburg disaster 64 years ago. Why didn't Congress step in and offer to cover damages from the next hydrogen inferno, giving us vast fleets of government-subsidized flammable airships criss-crossing our skies? Think what Mohamed Atta could have done with one of those.

The Ford Edsel was a breakthrough design in 1957, but not many were purchased -- foolish consumers thought they wanted smaller, sportier cars which cost us all more for medical care when drivers are injured more seriously in accidents. Citing such "public health" concerns, couldn't Congress have afforded to simply subsidize half the purchase price? Ford might still be churning out the clunky behemoths -- never having found a need to shift resources to cars more competitive with the new foreign imports. Who the heck "needs" disc brakes?

If Price-Anderson was just a temporary measure until the nuclear power plants could demonstrate a convincing safety record, why isn't 44 years enough?

What is it, precisely, that all those congressmen who voted for the Price-Anderson renewal Tuesday have against the fairness and efficiency of the competitive free-market system that made this country great?

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. To receive his longer, better stuff, subscribe to his monthly newsletter by sending $72 to Privacy Alert, 561 Keystone Ave., Suite 684, Reno, NV 89503 -- or dialing 775-348-8591. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available at 1-800-244-2224.

Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken

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