It’s a step in the right direction by the Japanese government but no way does it go far enough…

The Japanese Diet has unanimously approved a bill to revise the country’s nuclear damage compensation laws. Under the revised law, the nuclear liability of plant operators will be doubled by 2010.

From January next year in Japan, a nuclear power plant operator’s financial liability in the event of an accident will double from ¥60 billion ($600 million) to ¥120 billion ($1.2 billion). If any accident costs more than ¥120 billion to clean up, the Japanese taxpayer will have to pay the rest. ‘Beyond that, the government provides coverage, and liability is unlimited.’

When you look at some of the figures that surround the costs of cleaning up nuclear accidents, you see that even doubling the liability in Japan is still incredibly, unbelievably generous to the country’s nuclear power plant operators.

In his book, Nuclear War I and Other Major Nuclear Disasters of the 20th Century, Samuel Upton Newtan shows the truly staggering amounts of money that have been required to clean up after the Chernobyl disaster:

• The evacuation costs exceeded $5 billion.

• Cleanup costs for the first three years were about $19 billion.

• In the late 1980s, the Soviet government estimated the total losses, to the end of the 20th century, at $120 billion.

• Looking far into the future, another estimate by the Research and Development Institute of Power Engineering (in the former USSR) put the cost of Chernobyl at $358 billion. It is noted that this cost far exceeds the value of all Nuclear Power Plant electricity generated in the USSR up to 1986.

• In 1996, Belarus estimated the total cost to them would reach $235 billion by the year 2015.

•The Ukraine claimed Chernobyl could require up to 20 percent of its annual budget if the resources are available.

It goes without saying that the $1.2 billion liability figure doesn’t even scratch those numbers. It isn’t even near the cost of clearing up a far, far smaller accident.

Some countries are even more generous than Japan. In the UK the maximum liability is just £140 million (approximately $212 million) and even that has been waived for the lucky companies bidding to clean up the radioactive nightmare at Sellafield. The UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority will also compensate operators for their loss of income after an accident, even if it was their fault.

It shouldn’t need spelling out why nuclear operators get such a sweet deal and why the economics of the nuclear industry are so distorted. Such are the doubts and the lack of trust in nuclear power it is unable to operate under the usual terms of any other business. And when we have governments and taxpayers so willingly opening their wallets and purses, why should it? Asked to stand on its own two feet, the nuclear industry would immediately fall over.