#NuclearCommissionSAust willing to pass huge costs on to future generations
we are bequeathing a stream of costs to our successor generations. They will be poorer as a result, and will have reason to curse their forebears for selfishly making themselves better off at their expense.
Nuclear waste dump confounds cost-benefit analysis, In Daily, 23 Feb 16 The proposal for a South Australian high level nuclear waste dump places too much risk on future generations, argues economist Richard Blandy.
The Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission delivered its tentative findings on 15 February. It is seeking responses to these findings up until 18 March. I intend to submit this article to the commission for its consideration.
The only aspect of the nuclear fuel cycle that received the Royal Commission’s support in its tentative findings was the storage and disposal of used nuclear fuel, entirely from overseas, obviously. The Royal Commission described such an integrated storage and disposal facility as “likely to deliver substantial economic benefits to the South Australian community”.
I believe that the Royal Commission has got this wrong and that South Australia should not use part of its land mass as a dump for highly radioactive used fuel from overseas nuclear reactors (called “high level waste”) which, in the Royal Commission’s own words, “requires isolation from the environment for many hundreds of thousands of years”.
The reason why South Australia should not allow a nuclear dump within its borders goes to the heart of cost-benefit analysis involving many generations of people, literally tens of thousands of generations, in this case. Cost-benefit analysis works well when the costs are up front and the benefits accrue into the future. But it falls apart when the benefits are up front and the costs accrue into the future.
This is the case with the proposed high level nuclear waste dump. We are promised an up-front bonanza, after 30 years of construction of the facility, with a net present value of “more than $51 billion (at the intergenerational discount rate of 4 per cent)”. Continue reading
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