Price-Anderson Act's $16.1 Billion Liability Cap Has Not Kept Pace with Potential Accident Costs Estimated at $560+ Billion, Socializing Catastrophic Risk onto Taxpayers

The Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act caps total nuclear accident liability at $16.1 billion (as of January 2024), composed of $500 million in private insurance per site plus retrospective premiums from all reactor operators, but independent estimates of a severe accident's economic damage range from $314 billion (1982 Sandia study) to over $560 billion in current dollars — meaning 97% of potential damages would fall on the federal government and affected communities. Why it matters: the liability cap functions as an implicit subsidy that makes nuclear power appear cheaper than its true risk-adjusted cost, so competing energy technologies (solar, wind, gas) that bear their full liability costs are disadvantaged in market comparisons, so communities near reactors bear catastrophic residual risk without corresponding compensation mechanisms, so older relicensed reactors with aging components carry the same insurance requirements as new builds despite higher risk profiles, so public trust in nuclear safety assurances is undermined when critics point out the industry cannot obtain full private insurance. The structural root cause is that the Price-Anderson Act was originally passed in 1957 to bootstrap a nascent industry that no private insurer would fully cover, and Congress has renewed it repeatedly (most recently extended to 2065 in the FY2024 appropriations act) because the nuclear industry argues that removing the cap would make nuclear power economically unviable — effectively confirming that the private market prices nuclear risk far higher than the Act allows.