So what do you Austrians think about it nuclear safety regulations. After all, not all of you are anarcho-capitalists I assume so there is some pragmatism too.
After these recent events at Fukushima, I haven’t read many people advocating to stop nuclear safety agencies. After all, I was actually hoping to see some very good arguments regarding that sector. After the financial crisis, there was lots of articles demanding less regulation, perhaps rightly so, but now after the nuclear incident I don’t see too many. Can anyone point me out?
Apparently TEPCO had fabricated data and lied in the past regarding its nuclear reactors. Some engineer was paid to shut up about the safety problems too.
I don’t consider complete lack of regulation in regarding nuclear safety totally unreasonable, I just want to know what the stances are around here.
Nuclear power is heavily subsidized and heavily regulated. It is doubtful that nuclear power would even exist in a free market and, if it did, it would certainly have to be smaller scale and more de-centralized to make the risks insurable. In a free market with strict liability, every person displaced from their home, every piece of property rendered unusable by radiation, etc. would have to be restituted by the owner of the nuclear power plant. As you can imagine, no power plant the size of Fukushima would be insurable in such a system.
That Japan proved why governments are abject failures at regulating and that a state should not be trusted to subsidise/insure an industry. Which insurance agency would insure Tepco? Who would lend it money to finance its operations when high risks associated with the plant could easily offset rewards involved, especially if no one insured it? Who would invest in it when they could just as easily invest in safer assets? Voluntary standards on a market, such as bearing insurance and/or being audited to gain access to credit, lenders etc. are more powerful regulators than any government could hope to be.
In the end, who in the Japanese government will be punished for all this?
There do exist nuclear reactors that physically can’t meltdown, such as the CANDU reactors. One must remember that the Fukushima plant is not representative of current reactors in terms of safety. It was only two weeks away from being decommissioned when the earth quake struck, it was a boiling water reactor so it’s less stable then modern pressurised water reactors, and the diesel backup engines were placed underground instead of above ground. Modern reactors are so much safer that it isn’t really comparable.