Remove Hidden Subsidies for Nuclear Power

Regarding proposals to build new nuclear power stations in the UK, the International Energy Agency has said that any new nuclear programme must be funded entirely from the private sector, without any government subsidy or market intervention. And Lord Truscott, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Energy, has said there would be no subsidy, levy, nuclear obligation or market intervention to help launch a new nuclear programme.

But there are massive subsidies for the nuclear industry, although they are disguised and not obvious at first sight. Here are just three examples:

* Throughout the world, the nuclear industry pays only a small fraction of the cost of insuring fully against the costs of a Chernobyl-style accident or worse. For example, "... in the United States, the Price-Anderson Act limits the nuclear industry's liability in the event of a catastrophic accident to $9.1 billion, which is less than 2% of the $600 billion guaranteed by the Congress. In any case, $600 billion is considered to be a gross underestimate ..." (Helen Caldicott, "Nuclear power is not the answer", p. 32). Similar limitations on liabilities in the UK are a huge subsidy for the nuclear industry.

* In July 2006, a Daily Mirror reporter, with a photographer, managed very easily to plant a 'bomb' on a flask of nuclear waste in a railway siding (see www.mng.org.uk/gh/renewable_energy/daily_mirror_nukes1.htm). The public is being made to carry the risk, and the corresponding costs, that arise from allowing the industry to run these trains throughout the UK without a full armed guard on every train. This is another large subsidy for the industry.

* Future generations are being made to pay for the costs arising from nuclear waste that will be dangerous for thousands of years. This represents a very large subsidy from those people, yet to be born, to the nuclear industry of today.

Before any new nuclear power stations are built in the UK, the first two hidden subsidies must be removed and the problem of long-lived nuclear waste must be solved.

There is more about the many headaches with nuclear power at www.mng.org.uk/gh/no_nukes.htm.

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