Nuclear Accident 17 -Canada Raised Liability Limits for Nuclear Industry
I have blogged about the Price-Anderson Act in the United States that defines a process for recovering damages from the owners of a nuclear power plant in case of a major accident. Each operator has to have three hundred and fifty million dollars of insurance per reactor and be ready to pay another one hundred and twelve million dollars over a period of time following an accident. There is a provision for Congress to recover additional costs from the plant owners if the total cost exceeds four hundred and sixty two million dollars.
The Price-Anderson Act was created at the dawn of the nuclear power age in the U.S. in the 1950s. It was considered necessary to give plant owners some protection in case of a major accident because of concern by investors about huge liabilities. It was only supposed to be temporary but was repeatedly renewed until the present day.
Now Canada has passed a new law that raises their liability limit for nuclear plant owners. Their original limit was a seventy five million Canadian dollar cap on the liability of a nuclear plant owner when there was a major accident. It had been in place for forty years. The new limit has been raised to one billion dollars. The federal government had been trying to raise the limit to six hundred and fifty million Canadian dollars for years but had been blocked by powerful opposition in their parliament.
Canada is also joining a program of the International Atomic Energy Agency for supplementing compensation for a nuclear accident. All member nations pay into a pool that a member can draw on for up to four hundred and fifty million Canadian dollars in the event of a nuclear accident. This makes their possible compensation ceiling one billion four hundred and fifty mission Canadian dollars.
While this is over three times the set numbers of U.S. liability, the U.S. Congress does have the right to seek additional compensation. However, that would mean that a bill would have to pass both houses and these days it seems to be almost impossible for Congress to agree on anything enough to pass a particular bill so that might not be an option. Even if the U.S. government could pass a bill to squeeze a particular company for more money to cover the cost of cleaning up a nuclear accident, the company could declare bankruptcy and stick the tax payers with the bill.
I appreciate the governments of the U.S. and Canada as well as the IAEA for their concern about getting nuclear plant owners to pay for the consequences of major nuclear accidents but the limits they have set are absurdly low. The estimate for the cost of cleaning up the accident at Fukushima is currently around two hundred and fifty billion U.S. dollars and that estimate will probably rise. So the plans of both Canada and the U.S. for nuclear liability are currently set at under one percent of the probable cost of a major nuclear accident. There has been some effort to raise the liability in the U.S. to six hundred and fifty billion dollars but it has so far been unsuccessful.
Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission:
