Nuclear risk insurance

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“Guest Post by Luke Weston. Luke is a Melbourne-based physicist and occasional freelance electronic engineer, with a strong interest in educating the community about nuclear energy and related issues.

It is often said by the anti-nuclearists that the commercial nuclear energy industry “can’t get insurance” against the risks of nuclear or radiological accidents, or that it is “uninsurable”. This is simply garbage, a myth, a load of baloney that gets exclaimed backwards and forwards between the anti-nuclearists, without any of them ever bothering to actually check the facts or do the research. It’s simply a meme, one of many nonsense pseudo-fact memes that persist in the community of people who are really just devout believers that nuclear energy is bad.

The Price-Anderson Act in the United States is often bought up by anti-nuclear activists as some sort of damning evidence of preferential government treatment for nuclear energy, but it’s actually quite the opposite – it’s legislation which imposes exceptional demands on nuclear energy above and beyond any other industry; demands which are completely out of proportion to the reality of the demonstrably low risk of nuclear energy, especially relative to other energy sources.

This should be compared with the risks associated with other important energy generation systems, where the industry is not insured in any such way against significant impacts on society and the environment…”