This is why I don't understand nuclear power advocates:
> Dealing with all the radioactive waste left on site is a slow-motion race against time, which will last so long that even the grandchildren of those working on site will not see its end. The process will cost at least £121bn.
Example:
> The expenditure rises because structures age, growing more rickety, more prone to mishap. In 2005, in an older reprocessing plant at Sellafield, 83,000 litres of radioactive acid – enough to fill a few hundred bathtubs – dripped out of a ruptured pipe. The plant had to be shut down for two years; the cleanup cost at least £300m.
Nuclear power is the posterchild for the flaws in public-private partnerships ("PPPs"). These simply shift profits to private industry and liabilities to governments. That's it. Don't believe me? Example [1]:
> The U.S. Price-Anderson Act limits the liability of nuclear plant owners if a radioactive release occurs to $450 million for individual plants and $13.5 billion across all plants.
So if Chernobyl happened to a US nuclear plant the operating company would be on the hook for at most $450 million. Think about that.
The article mentions the 1957 fire. This is lesser-known than Chernobyl (which is often dismissed as an outlier) and less severe but still a major disaster. It's known as the Windscale Fire [2].
[1]: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/nuclear...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
> Dealing with all the radioactive waste left on site is a slow-motion race against time, which will last so long that even the grandchildren of those working on site will not see its end. The process will cost at least £121bn.
Example:
> The expenditure rises because structures age, growing more rickety, more prone to mishap. In 2005, in an older reprocessing plant at Sellafield, 83,000 litres of radioactive acid – enough to fill a few hundred bathtubs – dripped out of a ruptured pipe. The plant had to be shut down for two years; the cleanup cost at least £300m.
Nuclear power is the posterchild for the flaws in public-private partnerships ("PPPs"). These simply shift profits to private industry and liabilities to governments. That's it. Don't believe me? Example [1]:
> The U.S. Price-Anderson Act limits the liability of nuclear plant owners if a radioactive release occurs to $450 million for individual plants and $13.5 billion across all plants.
So if Chernobyl happened to a US nuclear plant the operating company would be on the hook for at most $450 million. Think about that.
The article mentions the 1957 fire. This is lesser-known than Chernobyl (which is often dismissed as an outlier) and less severe but still a major disaster. It's known as the Windscale Fire [2].
[1]: https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/energy/nuclear...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire