Reply #4: At Three Mile Island the external costs were essentially zero.

[NNadir]

There was no loss of life and no damage to the surrounding area. The owner of the facility paid most of the cost. They lost a valuable reactor.

At Chernobyl the loss of life (currently) is well under 1000, a figure a typical city exceeds by 40 apparently every year. (That's right, New York has 40 Chernobyls every year from air pollution.) Nevertheless a huge area was evacuated and deaths continue to occur today. Though this is tragic, it does not approach the costs of air pollution of other forms of energy. The authors of the study have studied only the EU. The EU does not have RBMK reactors, nor does any Western Country, unless you consider Cuba as being in the West.

Right now the Chernobyl exclusion zone is home to over 40 endangered species, all of which thrive owing to the exclusion of human beings.
This is reported in the scientific journal Environmental Science and Toxicology, a copy of which is available on the Internet: http://www.nsrl.ttu.edu/chernobyl/wildlifepreserve.htm

Here is a quote from the article: "We discussed such matters with Dr. Victor Baryakhtar, Vice President for Ukraine's Academy of Sciences. When comparing the ecological consequences of the Chornobyl region to those in the highly industrialized heavily populated areas of eastern and southern Ukraine, he observed, 'Northern Ukraine is the cleanest part of the nation. It has only radiation.'"

That's at ground zero and it gives a very good idea of the magnitude of the costs of other energy in the Ukraine.


I would guess that the 2700 square km of the exclusion zone - reported is relatively tiny when compared with the amount of strip mines that are used to provide coal - and strip mines BTW do not become thriving ecosystems as the Chernobyl exclusion zone has become.

Simply because you ignore strip mines and air pollution does not mean that they are free from external cost.

I say this every day here: The 10,000 year figure of concern (why not pick 2,000,000 years BTW) is based on ignorance of physics. The use of nuclear power in an actinide recycling scheme (as used in France, the UK and Japan) will reduce the overall radioactivity of the planet in about 1000 years. This is because nuclear fission destroys radioactive Uranium and Thorium, each of which decay (depending on mass number) through 10 to 12 nuclear (radioactive) daughter nuclei, such as radon, radium and protactinium. Many fission products decay completely to non-radioactive daughters before they are even removed from the reactor. Some do not, but because they are more radioactive than Uranium, they also decay faster: Hence the (real) 1000 year figure. See William Stacy, Nuclear Reactor Physics, John Wiley and Sons, 2001, pg 231 and references therein.

Yours is a reaction that is pretty typical, and pretty wrong, as the study given above proves.