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:Needs to be put in context

[AmiMoJo]

We need a name for this, maybe "nuke maths"?

Your calculation ignores two important factors. Firstly, the accident didn't just have monetary costs. It resulted in many people's lives being ruined. It is difficult to put a price on that, although the courts will try.

Secondly, amoritizing over all nuclear energy generated, or even all energy generated by that plant, doesn't reflect the fact that the cost is not born evenly by all purchasers of said energy.

Thirdly, it's a useless number. It only has meaning when compared to other sources of energy.

Fourthly, the cost wasn't just to Fukushima, it forced the long term shut-down of every other nuclear plant in the country. Now that people have started to re-examine the safety of those plants in detail, doing new geological surveys with modern equipment and learning from the failures at Fukushima, many of them won't re-open or need extensive modification.