Editorial Critique of the Price-Anderson ActFollowing is a letter to the editor, written February 2000
discussing the Price Anderson Act.Editor: The Star Ledger,
Officials at the nearby Indian Point Nuclear Plant downplay the risk from their steam leak (2/16/00 announcement). However, they would shut down that plant immediately, and permanently, if the Price Anderson Act were abolished.
The Price Anderson Act is a federal law which proves that the big guns in the nuclear industry do not believe one word of their own assurances about health and safety.
Price Anderson limits the liability of a nuclear plant to a microscopic fraction of what could be a hundreds of billions in damages. One German assessment estimated a potential of trillions for European plants.
The Price Anderson awards minuscule amounts in damages according to the dictates of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The NRC's decision cannot be appealed. Lawsuits against the utility are prohibited.
Utilities kick in a small fee each year, to pay for future damages. They may get a break in this fee if a second accident happens within one year.
The NRC will decide who gets paid, how much they get paid, and the order in which they get paid. You can bet that utilities and their lawyers will be first on line.
Everyone else will have a tough time collecting. They will be confronted by armies of industry "experts" who will tell them that they weren't harmed at all. It was all their imagination. That's what they told the victims of Three Mile Island. Many of those victims had radioactive poisons detected in their bodies, death, an elevated rate of cancer and other diseases.
The Act has a 10 year statute of limitations. Many cancers take longer than that to take hold. If it happens to you, you will automatically be disqualified from collecting a single penny.
A Supreme Court decision once declared that this fascist law is unconstitutional. That decision was reversed upon appeal with the argument that we need the unlimited energy provided by nuclear power. That argument was totally wrong.
There isn't enough fissionable uranium to fuel an expanded nuclear program unless we go to the plutonium breeder reactor. That would pose hideous economic, environmental, and nuclear weapons proliferation problems.
Nuclear power has guzzled enormous amounts of coal-fired electricity for the fuel enrichment process, and it has a poor net energy yield.
Other serious problems stopped all new orders of American plants since1978.
Indian Point has had a miserably poor operating record ever since it was foolishly built near an active earthquake fault, and so close to a large population center.
Its earthquake isolators were improperly sized, and it was operated even when while the safety systems were out of commission.
Although most of the management was fired, assurances from the latest team continue to have less credibility than a Confederate Three Dollar Bill printed in Liberia.
Sidney J. Goodman, P.E. M.S.M.E.
See http://www.geocities.com/mothersalert/indianpt.html
for more information on the Indian Point Accident.
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