I have blogged about nuclear accident liability before. In the U.S., the Price-Anderson Act sets limits on the amount of money that nuclear utilities would have to pay in case of an accident. In India, a stringent liability law has been preventing international nuclear technology companies from doing business with India. Japan has been dealing with major liability issues since the nuclear disaster at Fukushima. Recently Switzerland has been working on the enforcement of their nuclear liability law.
In 2008, Switzerland's parliament passed a new civil nuclear liability law but it has yet to go into effect. The Swiss Federal Energy Office (SFEO) just announced that the Swiss Federal Council adopted a revision of the original ordinance governing the enforcement of the new law in March of this year. The new ordinance revision increased the national minimum liability coverage from about a billion dollars to about one billion three hundred million dollars. There is a method included in the revision for calculating premiums that nuclear plant operators are obligated to pay for federal insurance. In addition to the liability of nuclear power plants, the new versions also deals with insurance minimums for nuclear research facilities and federal interim storage facilities at seventy six million dollars. The revision includes separate coverage for transport of nuclear materials. Some shipments of nuclear materials must be insured for eighty seven million dollars.
The revision of the ordinance simplifies the compensation procedure and makes provision for Swiss citizens who have been injured by a nuclear accident outside of Switzerland. The revision says that "the conditions for compensation and procedural provisions that would apply to Switzerland would be the same as for all other signatory states to the Paris Convention on Third Party Liability and the Brussels Supplementary Convention."
Switzerland's revised nuclear liability law cannot be put into effect until after the Paris Convention is ratified by at least two-thirds of the sixteen signatory nations. The earliest projected ratification of the convention is in 2016.
The SwissNuclear, the Swiss nuclear operators association, has stated that their members "supported the international conventions and thus the adjustment of coverage levels." SwissNuclear went on to say that the revised ordinance "burdens the owners of nuclear facilities by the end of the term with unnecessary additional premium costs." They complain that their members will not only have to pay for insurance for each of their facilities but will also have to purchase coverage for each transportation of nuclear material. This "reduces the international competitiveness of the Swiss electricity industry once more."
The nuclear industry wants the profits from building and operating nuclear power reactors but it seems that they are not so eager to pay for cleaning up nuclear accidents. The Fukushima disaster highlights one of the main problems with liability insurance. Four years after the disaster, nuclear experts in Japan are saying that the technology that will be required to recover and dispose of the melted reactors cores does not exist yet. With damages from the disaster still being catalogued, it is clear that the Japan really have no clear idea of what the Fukushima cleanup will ultimately cost or how long it will take. No matter what minimums are set for insurance for nuclear accidents, it is almost certain that the ultimate cost of cleaning up a future nuclear accident will exceed the liability threshold of the companies involved. Then, either the remaining contaminated soil, water and debris will just be left where it is or the utility rate payers and the tax payers will wind up footing the bill.
