U.S. ill-equipped to deal with Japan-like nuclear meltdown

[kristopher]

U.S. ill-equipped to deal with Japan-like nuclear meltdown
Published: Tuesday, September 20, 2011, 9:30 AM Updated: Tuesday, September 20, 2011, 2:21 PM
By Eliot Caroom/The Star-Ledger

There’s plenty of disagreement over whether U.S. nuclear power plants are ready to face disasters and run responsibly. The industry says they are, while critics maintain some plants are just like the ones in Japan that melted down and they are poorly monitored to boot.

But whatever the situation of any single U.S. reactor, the disaster in Fukushima has laid bare one truth on which experts and officials from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission agree: A disaster here would result in losses requiring the government to make payouts of epic proportions.

That’s because Fukushima will cost anywhere from $74 billion to $260 billion, according to Japanese experts, while the U.S. nuclear insurance fund, established by a 1957 law called the Price-Anderson Act, only has around $12.6 billion in reserve.

"If you have an accident or something like Fukushima, then Price-Anderson can’t handle those kinds of losses," said Wharton School professor Howard Kunreuther, who specializes in public policy.

Kunreuther co-wrote a paper on...

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/09/us_ill-equipped_to_deal_with_j.html

[dtexdem]

1. Nobody is well-equipped to deal with such a meltdown -- no one can be.

And it's not just a matter of money -- it's a matter of threats of megadeaths and of millenia of contamination of extensive areas.

[Hatchling]

2. What really frightens me is if the grid goes down.

A terrorist strike or an unlucky hit by a solar flare could take it down for weeks or even months. Trucking in enough fuel to keep the backup generators running to keep cooling them would be a logistic nightmare, especially since the country would be in shambles anyway. Hundreds of Fukushimas all over the country.