Reid: Nuke insurance plan bad

Benjamin Grove

Wednesday, Jan. 23, 2002 | 10:53 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., today criticized the nuclear power industry insurance plan that potentially leaves taxpayers liable for catastrophic accidents -- including one at the proposed Yucca Mountain waste repository.

"The nuclear power industry went through its troubled teenage years during the 1970s and the 1960s, moved through adolescence and has now settled into a comfortable middle age," Reid said. "It no longer needs the federal government to nurture it."

Reid held a hearing on the nuclear insurance plan on the opening day of this year's session of Congress. He assembled a panel of industry experts, plus model and anti-nuclear activist Christie Brinkley, who lent her "star power" to the hearing, Reid said.

At issue is whether Congress should re-authorize the Price-Anderson Act, first crafted by Congress in 1957, which lawmakers have routinely renewed.

According to the act, the owner of a nuclear reactor would pay up to $200 million in case of a catastrophic accident, and owners of the nation's other 105 nuclear reactors -- three are inoperative -- would pitch in up to $88 million more per reactor.

That would pool roughly $9.5 billion to pay for environmental and human damages. If the accident cost more than that, Congress -- and the taxpayers -- would be left to pay the difference.

The act is of interest to Nevadans because it also establishes rules for accident coverage for Department of Energy nuclear facilities. That would include the proposed -- but not yet approved -- national nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as well as waste transports to the site.

Department of Energy contractors would be largely shielded from paying for accidents in many cases, leaving taxpayers to pay for cleanup.

A nuclear accident could cost up to $600 billion, say some anti-nuclear activists, leaving taxpayers with a huge bill.

But nuclear industry officials said that estimate is grossly inflated. The nation's worst accident, at Three Mile Island in 1979, resulted in payouts of just $70 million, they said.

"The cost of Price-Anderson coverage is included in the cost of electricity; it is not a subsidy," said Marvin Fertel, senior vice president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's leading trade group. "In the history of the law, no taxpayer funds have been paid out for commercial losses under Price-Anderson."

But critics argue the act amounts to a subsidy for an industry the private sector won't insure.

"The time has come to shift the liability burden from the taxpayers to the nuclear industry where it belongs," Jill Lancelot of Washington-based Taxpayers for Common Sense said in a press release.

The legislation expires Aug. 1, 2002. If Congress does not renew it, existing reactors would still be covered, but not any future nuclear plants.

Industry leaders have set an ambitious goal of constructing as many as 50 new nuclear power plants in the United States in the next 20 years, even though new plants have not been ordered since the 1970s.