disaster | Stephen Leahy, International Environmental Journalist

Last week the Japanese govt injected $billions into Tepco, owners of the damaged Fukushima nuke plant that still poses a huge threat. Many more billions are needed to make it safe.

Stephen Leahy, International Environmental Journalist

By Stephen Leahy

UXBRIDGE, Canada, May 6, 2011 (IPS)

The nuclear energy industry only exists thanks to what insurance experts call the “mother of all subsidies”, and the public is largely unaware that every nuclear power plant in the world has a strict cap on how much the industry might have to pay out in case of an accident.

In Canada, this liability cap is an astonishingly low 75 million dollars. In India, it is 110 million dollars and in Britain 220 million dollars. If there is an accident, governments – i.e. the public – are on the hook for all costs exceeding those caps.

Japan has a higher liability cap of 1.2 billion dollars, but that is not nearly enough for the estimated 25 to 150 billion dollars in decommissioning and liability costs for what is still an ongoing disaster at its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Seven weeks…

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One year before Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, scientists feared global warming was going to make hurricanes more powerful.

Five Little-Known Facts:

“These are not natural disasters, they are environmental disasters.”
NOAA study found that Katrina was only a Category 1 or perhaps 2 on landfall
Storms in the NorthWest Pacific Ocean are 75 percent more powerful than they were 30 years ago
Climate change has the potential to raise oceans temperatures high enough create future hypercanes — 600 kilometre per hour superstorms
“The U.S. has a very big societal problem when it comes to coping with hurricanes” (ok, maybe you knew that)

This is a sampling of the little known information about hurricanes from respected scientists collected in the modestly titled “Steve’s Hurricane Handbook 2007 – Lessons Learned 2004-2006? “ (1.2 mb pdf). It’s a compendium of the most interesting quotes and facts about hurricanes from hurricane experts since 2004. Continue reading →