01 / 08 / 2008: News-Environnement.com
Nuclear power, environmental irresponsibility?
The leak of effluents contaminated with uranium occurred last July 8 on the site of the Socatri-Areva Tricastin (Drôme) led the company Areva to dismiss the director general of its subsidiary, the Socatri, and pay a compensation to injured farmers. This case refers to environmental responsibility and the principle of
polluter pays In the nuclear industry.
This month of July has been rich in radioactive events. After the malfunctions of the EPR construction site in Flamanville, the Tour de France nuclear accidents continues: the 8 July, 74 kilos of uranium spilled in effluents on the Tricastin site, the 17, leak on a pipe of the nuclear installation from the CERCA to Romans-sur-Isère, then, the 18 July, contamination of 15 temporary employees working at the nuclear power plant of Saint-Alban (Isère), and the 23 contamination of a hundred people in Tricastin. Events both serious and ordinary, which are part of the "banality of evil" that the philosopher Hannah Arendt evoked, sort of fatality of the society of the risk, whose opinion does not know what real gravity to attribute to them.
Some 900 "minor" incidents of the type of those declared in recent days to Tricastin are recorded each year in the nuclear power in France, testifying, according to experts, good control of the sector, but revealing, according to environmentalists, the dangerousness of this energy. This black nuclear series comes as the Environmental Liability Act was passed on July 22 2008. If it has enshrined in French law the notion of ecological damage, it has not taken charge of the nuclear risk. Indeed,
Because of the particular risks inherent in the nuclear industry and their cross-border nature, the civil liability of the operators does not fall under common law.An exorbitant regime of common law
In Europe, the operators of public or private nuclear installations, civil or military, are covered by the Paris Convention of 29 July 1960, the Brussels Supplementary Convention of 31 January 1963, the Protocol of 16 November 1982, then that of February 2004 amending this Convention. These texts provide that
repair of damage caused by a nuclear accident will be carried out on public funds, in the event that the damage exceeds the amount covered by the insurance or the financial guarantee of the operator. But this "repair" is itself limited.
In France, the transposition into domestic law of these agreements was made through the laws of 30 October 1968 and 11 May 1990 which are based on the principle of the strict liability of the operator and only him in case of accident nuclear, but limit for the moment this responsibility to 90 million euros by accident, the additional costs being borne by the State within the limit of 380 million euros. The financial guarantee will be increased to 700 million from the application of the 2004 Protocol, which now depends on the ratification of all the signatory countries.
In fact, these state guarantees apply only to nuclear accidents at or below 5 on the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) scale up to the 7 level. The Chernobyl disaster was 7, while the Three Mile Island accident (USA, 1979) was 5, like that of Windscale (Great Britain, 1957), and that of Saint-Laurent-des (France, 1980) level 4. Even the rich United States does not cover 6 and 7 level accidents.
This means that the huge consequences of such accidents would be borne by the victims. The possibility - and the historical reality at Chernobyl - of accidents at levels 6 and 7 should be recognized and supported by the nuclear industry. An insurance "ecotax" could apply for all levels of nuclear accidents, but it does not exist.A fair proposal for the internalisation of major nuclear risk costs has been formulated by two German economists. It consists of
apply the "polluter pays" principle by levying a tax of one euro cent per kWh produced by each reactor in the world. In the year 2000, the primary nuclear power generation of the 440 reactors of the world was 2586 TWh (2586 x 109 kWh). The fund thus constituted by the sums collected from nuclear operators would therefore be pledged to the tune of more than 25 billion euros per year. In twenty years, the amount of this fund would be of an order of magnitude sufficient to compensate the victims and cover the other costs of a major nuclear accident.
In the United States, in the mid-1950s, as civilian nuclear power began to interest some private investors in the United States, the question arose of the liability of operators in the event of accidents. Insurance companies refused to cover a risk difficult to quantify, Senator Clinton Anderson and MP Melvin Price proposed to Congress, from 1957, a short-term law (10 years) to help the development of nascent civil nuclear by bringing the Federal State guarantee in the event of an accident.
Specifically, this law limited the nuclear industry's liability to $ 560 million and limited the coverage of private insurance companies to 100 million per reactor. Prolonged several times, the current Price-Anderson Act raises these caps to 9,1 billion and 200 million dollars respectively. The cost of the Chernobyl disaster has been estimated at 360 billion for Russia, Ukraine and Belarus alone. The cost of a major nuclear accident in the United States is estimated between 500 and 600 billion depending on the location of the reactor that would be involved.
Given the ceiling of 9,1 billion, we can say that the US nuclear industry is only responsible for 2% of the potential costs of a major accident due to its activity! The other 98% would be paid by the taxpayer, via the Federal Treasury. In other words, we are far from the "polluter pays" principle of the Rio Conference (1992). One study estimated that the Price-Anderson Act is the equivalent of an 3,4 1990 annual public subsidy of XNUMX insurance costs avoided to the US nuclear industry.
The 22 last July has been transposed into French law, with one year late, the directive (2004 / 35 of 21 April 2004) on environmental responsibility with regard to the prevention and repair of environmental damage. This is the first European regulation strictly based on the "polluter pays" principle. During the parliamentary debate, MP Yves Cochet (Greens) proposed the creation of a compensation fund for victims, provisioned by the companies themselves, rather than by the taxpayer.
The question of the limitation period following the event giving rise to an environmental damage was also raised. Its duration, fixed at 30 years, proves insufficient to turn towards industrialists responsible for damage, such as the persistence of radioactivity, or the incidence of PCBs in the Rhone, which lasts several decades after their ban.
Finally, the member was surprised that nuclear power is part of the activities exempted from environmental responsibilities: the law must apply to the potential environmental and human health damages that could be caused by nuclear power plants.
Whether it is the compensation of the victims, the restoration of the environment after a nuclear accident, or the duration of the responsibility of an industrialist such as the Areva group after a damage in France, this striking is the disproportion between the financing provided for by the European Conventions and the real costs, which is incumbent on the community. Nuclear damage is always explicitly excluded from insurance policies, which implies that the compensation files will not be managed by the usual insurers of the victims, but by a specific device.
As for the diseases presumed to be caused by the nuclear accident, they are defined by decree. Compensation levels are also set by decree. Interlocutor in case of a serious accident is not clearly designated. It remains to establish a single window so that victims can identify a single referent for compensation. And above all, to develop post-accident situation management systems, not so much "for" society, as "with" it.
* Michael Kelly and Johannes Welcker, '' Risk Cover for Nuclear Power Stations '',
http://www.uni-saarland.de/fak1/fr12/we ... _Risk.html** JA Durbin and GS Rothwell, "Subsidies to Nuclear Power Through Price Anderson Liability Limit," Contemporary Policy Issues, Vol. VII, 1990, pp. 73-79
