It makes me wonder what the treatment of the Nuclear Waste Fund is. And whether that’s been mislabelled as a subsidy also.

It’s bad enough that the anti-nukes try to pass off ratepayers contributions as some kind of subsidy, when they’re really just paying the lifecycle price for their electricity, but having the government playing this kind of trick gives a view of how tilted the playing field really is.

Re: “The plant’s owner says the new 153 million euro tax that will go into effect in January is more than ten times the plant’s annual profit.”

That’s utterly insane. That scene’s just ripe for a overdue revolution.

James Greenidge
Queens NY

So true, so true! And even more vexing is that there are Puppy Rescue PSAs running all over cable TV in NYC but not ONE nuclear education PSA from professional nuclear organizations or even the the company itself that runs Indian Point which is under one mean bulls-eye by “Green” groups and the Gov. It’s totally unreal and pathetic!

James Greenidge
Queens NY

http://www.timesdispatch.com/opinion/our-opinion/mining-moritorium-unsupported/article_11e8ae74-fc0c-54b2-ae16-44611a0fbb8a.html

One point where your statements overstep what is reasonably certain is in the status of the reactor cores. Indeed, they did not escape primary containment, except for dissolved or gaseous traces amounting to a few kg of cesium and iodine total, but it is highly probable that core melt did burn through the reactor vessel itself in at least reactor 1 and reactors 2 and 3 to some degree also. And while the hydrogen explosions did not cause serious injury, I seem to recall that some workers on site were taken to hospital as a result, and there is no doubt that there was at least the potential for serious injury in those cases.

Thanks again for this excellent article.

For example, according to the recently released report by the American Nuclear Society, the few nuclear workers at Fukushima with the highest exposure can expect about a 1% increase in the risk of developing cancer over their lifetimes. Since the general population has a normal cancer rate of around 40% from all causes, an increase of 1% will be impossible to measure in such a small population (only a few workers). Of course the general population received radiation doses hundreds or thousands of times lower than these plant workers, and thus their increased cancer risk is “immeasurably low.”

I agree with you that protective actions taken to evacuate and shelter the population and to monitor for contaminated foods has kept radiation exposures low. That’s the whole point of a multifaceted emergency preparedness program. It was not perfect, but worked as designed to protect the population.