The EU Commission’s energy head is looking for a design for coverage in case of plant problems.
Guenther Oettinger, the energy chief for the European Commission, has said that the executive arm of the bloc will soon be presenting a proposal that will make insurance news, as it will involve mandatory disaster coverage for nuclear power plants.
This proposal is expected to be presented within the next few weeks for the EU’s consideration.
Oettinger made further insurance news when he announced that this proposal should be among the leading items on the agenda for the European Parliament’s elections which will be occurring in May 2014. Beyond that, he declined the opportunity to expand on what it will involve or what will occur after that point.
This insurance news could be one that is important to the entire world, which has little coverage of this nature.
There are some who believe that this insurance news will be the beginning of a trend that will be seen worldwide. The reason is that globally, there is very little coverage carried by nuclear power plants. Governments in most countries implicitly guarantee that if a disaster should occur, then they will pay for the majority of the costs.
In a number of countries throughout the European Union, the mandatory nuclear plant insurance covers liabilities worth only a few hundred million dollars. That said, it has been predicted that if a massive disaster should ever make insurance news, the actual cost could be as high as hundreds of billions of dollars, instead. This clearly means that the coverage would manage only the tiniest sliver of a fraction of the actual price tag from that type of dreaded event.
In the United States, the insurance news of that nature is quite similar. The required coverage for nuclear operators has a $375 million cap per plant. Other claims would be funded by utilities up to a top limit of $12.6 billion. This shows that while there could be more protection in place in the U.S., in a worst case scenario, it still would not have the complete level of coverage.
