Apptech wrote:

>>> This facility needs to be operated by a consortium of nuclear power
>>> plants. The cost has to be born not by the public but by the user.
>>> This is my objection.
>> 
>> The thing is that nuclear is a totalitarian form of energy. It requires
>> a central power to oversee and organize it -- and to push it through.
>> No central organization, no government intervention, no nuclear power.
>> With the subjects of the free market acting like they do, there is no
>> way nuclear power has any chance in a free market. 
>> 
>> You can't praise the free market one day and the next day think the
>> general public (the subjects that make the free market work) are too
>> ignorant to know what's good for them, energy-wise.
> 
> I hate to be "devil's advocate here" but it's horribly possible that in
> a TRUE free market the price would be all too low. 

Depends what you call a "true free market". My use of the term is one where
there are no externalities -- an ideal, of course, but so is most any other
social concept.

As long as people can be forced to accept radiation from a neighboring
property or substances leaking into the ground "for the greater good", it's
not a free market (in my sense).

> AFAIR Russia (post Soviet bloc?) has previously been a willing acceptor
> of nuclear waste. And I imagine that China would be happy to compete on
> the free market as a nuclear waste acceptor. 

And I'm quite sure that the people in the places where they dump it don't
get to say whether they want that or not -- not a free market in the sense
I use the term.

> And in a genuinely free market, for certain classes of waste, you may
> even get people lining up to pay you money to take it away. 

Only because they have places at their disposal that are not part of the
free market in my sense, and so they are creating an externality for the
free market.

> In fact, in a genuinely free market you'd get people lining up to take
> nuclear waste of  any sort away for free. 

Also only because they are backed by a non-free market.

> What happens after that is another matter. 

Not for me. Even if a country had a free market, but would start to sell
its waste to a non-free market, in my use of the term it would "import" the
non-free nature of the waste target market and therefore cease to be a free
market.

> In part nuclear waste handling HAS to be regulated at a government level
> because of how desirable and undesirable it is, all at the same time.
> Allowing this process into the invisible hand's hands would with
> certainty lead to utter disaster in short order. 

A free market isn't one where there is only the "invisible hand". A free
market is one that is free of coercion (at least) -- and that goes really
deep, if you think about it. I don't think there would be nuclear waste to
start with, without coercion.

If some free market proponents think that environmental regulations go too
far, they should try looking at this with the eye of a truly coercion-free
market: nobody is forced to tolerate any effects of someone else on his or
her property, without consent. This would have far-reaching consequences.
Anything else is coercion, needs regulation (as to how much one can be
forced to tolerate for the greater good) and is not "free" anymore.

Gerhard

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