Japan Fukushima Nuclear Plant 'Clean-Up Costs Double,' Approaching $200 Billion (bbc.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Japan's government estimates the cost of cleaning up radioactive contamination and compensating victims of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster has more than doubled, reports say. The latest estimate from the trade ministry put the expected cost at some 20 trillion yen ($180 billion). The original estimate was for $50 billion, which was increased to $100 billion three years later. The majority of the money will go towards compensation, with decontamination taking the next biggest slice. Storing the contaminated soil and decommissioning are the two next greatest costs. The compensation pot has been increased by about 50% and decontamination estimates have been almost doubled. The BBC's Japan correspondent, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, says it is still unclear who is going to pay for the clean up. Japan's government has long promised that Tokyo Electric Power, the company that owns the plant, will eventually pay the money back. But on Monday it admitted that electricity consumers would be forced to pay a portion of the clean up costs through higher electricity bills. Critics say this is effectively a tax on the public to pay the debt of a private electricity utility.

Comments

Re:Two Million Man-Years?

[Altrag]

Well since even TFS suggested that compensation was the lion's share of that amount, a quick Googling brings me to this article: which suggests, as of last year, that there was "still" 250,000 people displaced (the phrasing of which suggests that there was previously even more.)

So that's quite a bit larger than the 10k people you were suggesting. $200B/250k people works out to $800k per person. Which is still quite a lot, but not nearly as insane as it sounds if you'd been assuming only 10,000 people.

And of course that's not counting people who hadn't been displaced but may be getting compensated for some reason or other anyway.

Re:Comparisons

[drinkypoo]

Anyone able to run the numbers properly? From my v rough back of the envelope, it looks like $200bn would buy you about 0.7TW of solar capacity in today's money,

And this is just for the cleanup cost. The total lifetime cost will be vastly higher. And let's not forget that Tepco has literally lied about Fukushima at every turn. (I defy any reader to find any moment at which Tepco told the whole truth, even as they understood it.) The total cleanup cost will likely be much, much higher.