Economic math does not hold up when considering effects of nuclear power production

Why am I so obsessed with shutting down nuclear power plants?  Because I see their legacy as generating massively significant environmental and social impacts on human activities virtually forever.  Consider the effects on seawater (and the unspoken long-term effects on ocean plants and animals) that are now being reported at the Fukushima Dai-ich plant.

Consider this simple math:

 In 2011 there are 442operating nuclear power plants in the world with 65 under construction.

The cumulative operating experience amounted to 14,174 years by September 2010.

There have been three major nuclear plant disasters in roughly 50 years. That is one disaster  per 147 operating power plants or .68%. Or put another way, one disaster per 4,725 cumulative operating years (with cumulative meaning total operating hours of all nuclear plants over all history).  

Now consider the 19 nuclearpower plant accidents with multiple fatalities and/or more than US$100 millionin property damage from 1952-2011. Once again that is one major accident per 23 currently operating plants (4.3%), or one major accident per 746 cumulative operating years.

It can be argued that newer plants are ‘safer’ than older plants, which may be true. But once again when the older plants were constructed, major failures as we have experienced were not foreseen. And nuclear plant failures are subject to natural forces that also cannot be foreseen. 

All arguments for nuclear energy power plants are based upon present day analyses. Things like number of deaths associated with operations and failures, costs for building and maintaining, costs for cleanups are all evaluated using statistics based upon current and near-term data. The problem is that Nuclear is Forever (at least in terms of human civilization).

Where do the effects from a disaster like Chernobyl or Fukushima Dai-ich start and stop? There are really no boundaries in time or space for the termination of these effects (at least within the range of human civilization). Things like genetic mutations, background radioactivity, danger from present and used fission materials, costs for safeguarding spent materials and dealing with destruction and contamination from theft and malicious usage of spent materials will continue on for hundreds of thousands of years… which is ten to twenty times longer than societal human history!

So sure the industry can use statistics based upon the current effects of nuclear accidents, but this is a puny fraction of the real costs to humankind. The problem is that most decisions about human affairs come down to economic arguments… arguments that can only be based upon costs and benefits in the present and in the near-term. That is the only realm of economics. Economics provide little guidance to long term problems and dilemmas.  Decisions about nuclear power and other human activities with potential impacts extending well into the future should never be based upon dollars and cents.