THE NEW PRICE-ANDERSON

I take it from the overwhelming vote in the House (396-17) that the Senate will also pass the nuclear liability insurance bill in a similar form. The old law expired on August 1 [1987], but would have continued for all current reactors, licensed or under construction, anyway (a way of forcing over-insurance on one hand, while at-tempting to prohibit future nuclear construction on the other).

The present system, contrary to antinuke propaganda, does not take a cent of taxpayers' money (except for very small reactors, mostly at universities, which are being hounded out of existence anyway). Utilities pay $5 million per reactor into a common fund that stands available at all times for immediate compensation of accident victims, regardless of whether the utility was negligent or not, for it is a no fault insurance. This fund, plus regular (private) insurance, now provide coverage of up to $705 million.

I find nothing wrong with that part of the insurance, except perhaps the horrendous discrimination against nuclear power: elec-tricity generation by other methods (let alone some other industrial processes) are vastly more dangerous, but have nowhere near such good liability insurance. For example, the Teton dam in Idaho, owned by the biggest insurance company in the country (yes, the federal government), collapsed in 1976, killing, 7 people and causing $1 billion's worth of damage, but the Great Insurer in Washington, D.C., paid not a red cent. It took three months for President Ford to declare a state of emergency in retrospect so that the victims could somehow be compensated.

And all of this was connected with a hydroelectric plant of a crummy 20 MW (plus agricultural irrigation).

What is the coverage for some 200,000 victims and their property in the San Fernando Valley (Los Angeles) if the pumped storage dams above them collapse? Not Price-Anderson. And do they need insurance? Well, not until the next earthquake.

And in the non-energy field? There are drugs that patients cannot get for their diseases, and vaccines that parents cannot get for their children. The manufacturers have stopped producing them: they couldn't afford the insurance premiums anymore after brain-washed juries, rapacious lawyers and social reformers in judges' clothing forked out millions of other people's money to make themselves feel generous.

However, it is not this aspect of Price-Anderson that is objec-tionable. As insurance policies go, Price-Anderson is excellent, and I would rather have hydro-electric power and pharmaceutics brought up to Price-Anderson than have nuclear insurance degraded to the nebulous insurance, if any, covering hydroelectric dams.

What is objectionable is the very existence of a liability limit, and the PR trick of confusing liability with coverage that emerges from the haggling by sleazy lobbies with even sleazier politicians.