Nuclear Reactor Pool Fire/Huge Risks in U.S. According to Unpublicized NRC Study

[kristopher]

24. That is exactly what the major accident coverage is - and they don't pay "premiums"

6.1.2. Mandated Liability Coverage Is Small Relative to Potential Damages
Price-Anderson mandates two tiers of coverage for nuclear reactors. The first is a conventional liability insurance policy that provides $375 million in primary coverage per reactor. As of 2008 (with somewhat lower coverage levels than now in
effect), the average annual premium for a single-unit reactor site was $400,000; the premiums for a second or third reactor at the same site are discounted to reflect a sharing of limits (NRC 2008a). While coverage has increased incrementally over time, these increases are small: on an inflation-adjusted basis, coverage is less than 10 percent higher than the $60 million in primary insurance required under the original act 50 years ago. The lack of useful actuarial data may have justified lower-than-appropriate limits in the 1950s. However, improved data since that time, as well as the greater sophistication of insurance underwriting, should result in primary insurance policies that are substantially larger than today’s Price-Anderson requirements.
A second tier of coverage under Price-Anderson involves retrospective premiums paid into a common pool by every reactor if any reactor in the country experiences an accident with damages exceeding the primary insurance cap. The retrospective premiums have a gross value of $111.9 million available for damages, with an optional 5 percent surcharge available for legal costs only (bringing the combined total to $117.5 million) (ANI 2010, Holt 2010). Retrospective premium payments are capped at $17.5 million per year per reactor and thus can take seven years or more to be paid in full. Some additional coverage is available via the Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act: if the president declares a nuclear accident an emergency or major disaster, disaster relief could flow to first responders. Stafford Act funds would also come from taxpayers, and thus would be subsidies as well.

Koplow pg 79-80

"The lack of useful actuarial data may have justified lower-than-appropriate limits in the 1950s. However, improved data since that time, as well as the greater sophistication of insurance underwriting, should result in primary insurance policies that are substantially larger than today’s Price-Anderson requirements."

" Retrospective premium payments are capped at $17.5 million per year per reactor and thus can take seven years or more to be paid in full."

50 years after it received help getting started in the form of the Price Anderson Act, you wants to continue to subsidize the nuclear industry by allowing it to shift the cost of risks associated with its operation onto the backs of the public.

Why is that right?

Well, according to you its right because the airline industry has managed to hang onto a similar form of risk shifting. That doesn't justify the special treatment for the nuclear industry since two "wrongs" do not equal one "right". The airlines serve a social useful function but in fact the rail system as a viable alternative suffers greatly from a deck stacked against it. removing liability limits on airlines might make a difference, but the worst case scenarios for airlines are so vastly less expensive than those that could be expected with a nuclear accident, that I don't think it would actually make much of a competitive difference to rail.

That isn't the case for the alternatives to nuclear however. Just like with fossil fuels, one of the primary advantages of renewable technologies are their very low level of negative externalities. It isn't hard to understand why we want coal to accept it's externalized cost into its pricing structure, so why would it be any more difficult to thing that nuclear should meet the same standard?

We don't need nuclear; all you are doing with your antirenewable pronuclear crusade is slowing the transition away from carbon. There are reasons Roger Ailes and others like him embrace nuclear power, and your continued zeal to ignore those reasons belies all you say about your positive motives.