The disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facilities, which turned the 8.9 earthquake and tsunami into a sort of Irwin Allen trifecta, has spurred new calls to ban nuclear power.
Certainly Japan’s recent experience suggests that attempts to plan for worst-case scenarios tend to err on the low side. Nuclear power plants designed to withstand quakes an order of magnitude less still managed to shut down as designed; nevertheless, the earthquake and tsunami also damaged the backup power for their cooling systems.
So given the high stakes of a nuclear meltdown, and the manifest inability of planners to anticipate what might go wrong, it would make sense to ban nuclear power, right?
Well, the actual problem is that governments worldwide have been actively intervening for decades to prevent the market from banning nuclear power. Precisely because the stakes are so high and there’s so much room for unforeseen things to go wrong, nuclear power is uninsurable on the private market.
So, under the terms of the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act, the US nuclear industry bears the cost of insuring itself against liability only up to a small fraction of the damages that could result from a disaster like that currently underway in Japan. Above that amount the taxpayers are required to assume liability up to a higher level — which is still far less than the harm which could result from a full-scale meltdown. So if a reactor melts down, blanketing a thousand square miles around a major city with fallout and causing hundreds of billions in damages, the victims are pretty much S.O.L. (simply out of luck).
Legislative caps on liability far, far below the actual damages that would likely result … sound familiar? Here’s a hint: It starts with B, and ends with P.
In fact the liability issue is only one facet of a much larger theme: Nuclear power is a virtual creature of the government. The nuclear industry grew directly out of the US “Defense” Department’s nuclear weapons programs, and the first reactors were built as an offshoot of military production. A major portion of the cost of just about every single step in the nuclear power production chain, from the federal government providing preferential access to government land and building access roads at taxpayer expense for uranium mines, to the above-mentioned assumption and capping of liability, to taxpayer-funded storage of nuclear waste, shows up on your tax bill rather than on your electric bill.
As a Westinghouse executive testified before Congress in 1953:
“If you were to inquire whether Westinghouse might consider putting up its own money … we would have to say ‘No.’ The cost of the plant would be a question mark until after we built it and, by that sole means, found out the answer. We would not be sure of successful plant operation until after we had done all the work and operated successfully …”
Hmmm. Nuclear power was a no-go if 1) private industry had to put up its own money, or 2) it wasn’t guaranteed a profit. This writer’s regular readers might note this seems to be a pretty common business model in the corporate economy.
So the question is not whether government should ban nuclear power. The question is whether it should stop propping it up.
Translations for this article:
- Spanish, Cómo “Prohibir” la Energía Nuclear.
Citations to this article:
- Kevin Carson, Nuclear power doesn’t need government backing, Portales, New Mexico News-Tribune, 03/24/11
- Kevin Carson, Should government stop propping nuclear power?, AllAfrica, 03/21/11
- Kevin Carson, Should government stop propping nuclear power?, Kampala, Uganda Daily Monitor, 03/21/11
- Kevin Carson, How to “ban” nuclear power, Seoul, Republic of Korea JoongAng Ilbo, 03/21/11
- Kevin Carson, How to “Ban” Nuclear Power, Des Moines, Iowa Free Press, 03/19/11
I would tend to disagree. Nuclear disasters are high profile and so get disproportionate coverage, but all sources of energy (except perhaps wind and solar, which aren't sufficient for generating 100% of power without changes in energy usage) have the potential for disaster. You mention that oil and nuclear can't survive without government. Similarly, hydroelectric dams could burst and the lawsuits over health costs imposed by coal would eliminate that, etc. Even a fire in a hearth is a potential disaster. So, are we to conclude that a libertarian society would end up with no forms of energy more advanced than sunlight and that the statists are correct to assume that a modern society is impossible without government? Or, rather, would there be some enterprising individuals who would realize that the risk from a nuclear plant is near zero (even though the cost of a disaster is extremely high, so that an insurer would still be unlikely to risk it) and so lead to communities that permit the creation of nuclear plants in which residents waive their right for compensation in response to certain cataclysmic situations in exchange for a share of the revenue generated (from the slightly higher cost of energy, due to slightly decreased supply).
In before technophiles knee jerk in defense of the atom.
In any case, while I believe this article is a great instance to make a great point, the difficulty isn't so much in making the point but rather in convincing people that the alternatives are reasonable or even desirable. Because eventually, it comes down to questions of "how can you expect us to live without x (paved roads, industrial aviation-government complex, etc.), when it obviously makes our lives so much easier/happier/better/higher standard of living?"
What needs to be addressed is the fear of an alternative that wasn't chosen, or at least the irrational notion that simply because something is doesn't mean a more positive alternative couldn't have occurred or be made out of what is. As it is, I imagine that people won't like the message that some (or even most) of the "technology" and "comfort" they've lived with could very well end up disappearing once they aren't propped up.
This is a story that needs to be widely circulated; in Vermont the supposedly "Free Market" Ethan Allen Institute think-tank is one of nuke power's most ardent defenders. I do a bit of a face-palm whenever I encounter their hypocritical propaganda…
It's not so much that nuclear power wouldn't exist without subsidy, but I think it would look quite different. The Toshiba 4S "nuclear battery" is a perfect example –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S
http://www.roe.com/about_techGalena.htm
You assume that a freed market would "ban" nuclear power…. I think it would make it much safer. Ironically the same regulatory environment that you blame for limiting liability also stifles innovation and forces reactor size to be scaled up. From the wiki article…. "Current obligatory insurance and legal compliance is blind to the scale of a reactor and places virtually the same burden on multi-gigawatt power plants and comparatively small 30 kW installations". I think I read somewhere that it costs almost a billion dollars to certify a single reactor design through the NRC. Regardless, a real market would radically transform lots of things and I think you should be careful when making assumptions about what it would or wouldn't do.
Just a question on the tenses, here, from some bloke wot don't know nuthin' and don't have no dog nohow anyway. Granted that nuclear power tech wouldn't have happened (as it did) without governments, and that it was a no-go if private industry had to put up its own resources and have itself on the hook should it not work out — would that still hold true *today* if, say, all human knowledge about nuclear power plant tech was made freely available to all (not sure how prudent that would be either, but y'no)?
In short: okay, it took states to *make* nuclear power as a technology and as an industry. But that's done; it's known, it's here, now.
Would it still take states to make nuclear power viable, always in all places, today?
And that aside, is nuclear power even prudent in (many, any, no) situations?
Miko builds straw-man, Miko knocks down straw-man.
Miko never addresses Kevin's essay.
Miko feels victorious for defeating a scarecrow, but Oxtrot wonders what was Miko's point. OOOH. Skay-uh-whee proposition, that people would be entitled to compensation for harms wrought by others! Scares Miko so much that Miko has to use straw-man arguments to distract from the KNOWN dangers of nuclear power.
Is Miko working for Exelon? GE?
Rhetorical ping-pong notwithstanding, Miko's arguments are rooted in a fear of moving backward technologically. If Miko were to examine the landscape Miko would be forced to conclude that there (1) is no free energy on Earth; (2) all present forms of energy require some form of destruction to access their potential to move humans or machines that serve humans; and therefore (3) the question is, how are we going to continue living as a technology-based society if our technology depends on destroying the planet we live on?
Perhaps Miko wants to avoid that question.
But I do not want to avoid it.
There was an episode of a video blog not too long ago (Dr. Kiki's Science Hour – yeah, sue me, she's smart and attractive, I can't help it) about nuclear power and how there is a different, much safer variety that basically suffered a similar fate to BetaMax. Episode 84: http://twit.tv/dksh84
I personally feel the solution to all this is not energy independence but rather energy interdependence. Or energy autonomy. There are already affordable fuel cell generators that can power a house (affordable being relative here to the cost of buying power over the lifespan of the generator). If efforts were concentrated on the area of small-scale, distributed power generation I think a lot of this could be alleviated or even avoided.
I think Miko is addressing the primary contention of Kevin's essay – that if we had a truely freed market where risk and expense could not be externalized then there would be no nuclear power. This seems predicated on the idea that nuclear power would be exactly like it is today… and that seems like a failure of imagination. I agree that this essay seems similar to the statist arguments that we wouldn't have [clean drinking water/security/roads] if not for government. Except in this case the thing in question is something Kevin thinks is bad.
It's important to keep in mind the seen vs the unseen when considering the costs associated with nuclear power that Carson notes are paid indirectly via taxes. It's not entirely accurate to compare the costs of such things today to their costs absent a centralized State. For example, the production of uranium (if there were a demand) or road-building, or of a nuclear plant itself, would likely be much less expensive in the freed market.
The real question should be, absent State subsidies, what is the least-expensive form of energy per btu? Besides the existence of the market distorting State, access to energy is probably the most-significant ingredient to increase standards of living and lift people out of poverty.
Would it be better to have one nuclear plant or thousands burning dung in their huts (consider labor, deaths caused, etc.).
The one flight that crashes attracts a lot of attention because it's an outlier, yet thousands of flights go off without a hitch. The same is true for nuclear power. I'm not saying it's the best answer but it's important to step back and look at this with some context. I'm sure some innovative people could come up with some pretty badass tech that we haven't even considered.
This 2008 article < ;http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=13389> notes three separate efforts to market miniature (the smallest about the size of a hot tub, in the middle approximately the size of a railroad box car and the largest something like room-size), community-level (20K homes) nuclear alternatives which, at least on the surface, don't appear to exhibit the short-comings discussed above and might well fit under Kevin's home-brew, low-overhead umbrella.
No question that in the 1950s nuclear power plants would not have been built without government underwriting, or at least that they would have developed much more slowly. A free market would, as Kevin says, have imposed caution upon an emerging technology with obvious risks attached.
However, technology waits for nobody; the world would not have stuck in the 1950s. Just as government artificially force-fed the industry at that dangerous time, so it has artificially restrained it following TMI, during a quarter century when the understanding of what it takes to stay safe was growing by leaps and bounds. Thus, as very frequently happens, government intervention was exactly out of phase; encouragement when caution was need, prohibition when development could have saved an ocean of oil.
In the particular case of Japan, its government was so inept as to arrange for a string of nukes to be built right along a known geologic fault line, on a coast so prone to tsunamis as to generate the word itself; and then to place backup cooling pumps in a basement ready to be flooded by the first wave, fed by fuel tanks situated above ground ready to be swept away by the second. This disaster was created absolutely by government and in its absence, would not have taken place.
My recent post 11A062- Just Whats Needed! – Another War- 3-3-2011 Two are hardly enough
The issue isn't so much whether nuke plants are feasible or scalable, or what their safety record is. It seems to get to a more basic issue of market-anarchism. How do we deal with externalities in ANY area of activity that exceed, or may exceed, the individual's (or group's, corporation's, community's) ability to remediate them? Regarding Miko's notion that you would only need to get the local community to waive compensation — in the case of a nuke plant, a catastrophic meltdown could adversly affect millions of people, far beyond the local area, for decades after the disaster. How on Earth do you indemnify against THAT? Even with "pocket" nuke plants, where does the waste go? Again, we're talking about potential worst-case spillover effect that would far exceed a local community's ability to pay for fixing. And if an insurance provider were willing to carry the policy, what kind of fund reserve would they need to deal with a disaster that kills or sickens thousands (millions?) or renders a large area of land unusable for centuries?
Sorry, more questions than answers.
"You assume that a freed market would "ban" nuclear power…. I think it would make it much safer."
I'm willing to accept this possibility; it just seems like nuke apologists are always trotting out some proposed miracle reactor as an oblique defense of current reactors. I'm sure that's not what you mean, Guest, but it's still a pattern I've noticed. If advocating for clean nuclear designs also includes shutting down every present reactor, then let's talk.
There's a bigger issue here, BTW, than merely the environmental and liability danger involved in nuke power. The gov't is not merely selecting for nuke power specifically; rather it is, as Kevin often argues, selecting for capital intensive power. It is crucial that, if we're going to step back and consider all possibilities, that we not stop at simply dreaming of a better, cleaner power source. We have to consider instead the consumers of this power: the kinds of overgrown, top-heavy, centralized, wasteful energy consumers that for which the statist nature of both our economy and infrastructure selects. It's not merely how the energy is created; it's the volume needed, elevated by many as a good in and of itself instead of as a result of particular decisions in the state corporate economy.
My recent post Class Struggle in Civil Service
Now you guys and gals know the screaming meemees would never allow a free market for uranium, just look at the lengths they go to regulate the .22 long rifle cartridge and knife blades.
Is there a state that pursued nuclear power for its own sake? I’m under the impression that nuclear weapons and related continuing industry are generally the underlying motive for subsidy of “atoms for peace”.
On another note, there is no way to safely sequester nuclear waste (in quantity) for the period of time required to render it harmless. Or even closer to harmless. The waste outlives the lifetime of the generating stations by orders of magnitude. There’s a documentary about Finland’s nuclear waste “solution” (titled “Into Eternity”) that highlights several aspects of the absurdity of the proposition.
Finally, if a dam breaks and floods or an airplane goes down it doesn’t kill people for decades thereafter and render the site of the disaster unlivable for longer. Those kind of farcical arguments are… a joke.
Why do we try so hard to create more power when we need to think about using less? Could we not reduce the power we use instead of clinging to our wasteful ways.
I don't give a shit about nuclear power or a technological society. I want freedom, and I want it regardless of its effect on technology or creature comforts. Several of these comments sound like central planners talking, trying to "save" technology, or decide whether burning dung is better or worse "for society" than building nuclear plants. Who put you in charge? Others sound like whining babies, afraid of a future without their favorite toys, desperate to hold on to nuclear power in some form or other, implying that lack of nuclear powered toys=poverty.
If you only want liberty if it comes with all the comforts you 'enjoy' under the statist system, if you think only those who have the most toys 'win,' if you would trade liberty for a lap top computer or a nuclear power plant or any technological toy, if you think lack of toys = poverty, if you don't value life and liberty more than any toy, then don't call yourself a libertarian or an anarchist.
My recent post Who Sleeps With The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
I agree with you. What would the free market in electricity generation be like if it weren't for the government? Depending on the pollution and potential liability costs maybe solar and wind are the only two realistic ways to generate power.
On the subject of energy…
Think of the vast reduction in oil consumption if we stopped all the school buses and the war machines.
Millions of dollars worth of missiles were just unleashed against Libya when all that the freedom fighters wanted was to be able to purchase armaments to defend themselves and free their homeland…much the same as American freedom fighters will desire in the coming collapse.
Guest, Kevin Carson doesn't contend that there would be no nuclear power in a freed market (though he might justifiably believe that). In fact, the phrase "freed market" is not used at all in this essay. What is contended is that the nuclear power industry in the actually-existing corporate economy is a creature of the state. This claim is compatible with whatever hypothetical safe and profitable nuclear power plants you can imagine might exist in an alternate reality.
I don't think it's predicated on the idea that nuclear power would be exactly like it is today. I think it's predicated on the idea that however nuclear power looks there is still the chance that it will accidently kill everything for miles around and render the area uninhabitable for decades if something goes wrong. But that's a reasonable assumption to make since that's just what radiation does in large doses. He's also right that the insurance premium would be enormous for a project like this.
I'm skeptical that a free market would ban all nuclear power. But yeah, you wouldn't see too many nuclear power plants built right next to a tsunami-prone coast with a major fault line on a densely-population island.
The following is from an email I received from Anthony Flint
I noticed in your article on nuclear power that you used a quote by a Westinghouse executive to show nuclear power wasn't viable without the state. In case you write about it again, I thought you might like to update that quote. In 2007, 6 investment banks informed the Energy Department they were unwilling to povide loans to nuclear power.
“We believe these risks, combined with the higher capital costs and longer construction schedules of nuclear plants as compared to other generation facilities, will make lenders unwilling at present to extend longterm credit."
The reference for the quote is provided in the link.
http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/wallstreet.pdf
I just thought it was important as people seemed to be saying that that quote was from decades ago and the same conditions don't apply now. US banks think otherwise.
You're exaggerating the effects of a nuclear plant disaster. Let's look at the worst nuclear disaster in history, Chernobyl. 31 people died, all staff or emergency workers. On top of that, the WHO estimates a further 4000 deaths potentially resulting.
I don't really need to state that 4000 deaths is bad, but let's put this into context. How many people die every year because of air pollution caused by coal, natural gas, and oil? I'll give you a hint: it's a lot more than 4000.
Nuclear power isn't perfect. However, it's a lot cleaner and safer than burning coal, or oil, or natural gas. Since solar and wind aren't viable for large-scale energy production, and hydroelectric isn't viable everywhere, nuclear is the best bet for the future.
tl;dr Nuclear disasters don't affect nearly as many people as the fearmongers suggest, and is in fact safer and cleaner than the major alternatives.