>> We don't need more regulation or oversight, we need more direct
>> responsibility. Private ownership combined with unlimited liability

> While I agree in principle with this... How do you get to direct
> responsibility without regulation and oversight? ...

That part's easy :-).
You 'simply' establish a body that has liability for any outcomes at
that site, however caused., and you require it to be backed up by an
insurer with adequately deep pockets, and you require such insurers to
be part of a cooperative group which will guarantee their
underwriting. eg as Lloyds does for shipping and similar liabilities.
That way there is ALWAYS a path back to a suitably large pool of money.

The HARD part is persuading any insurers to front up at all and any
group to underwrite them. You may be able to get Nick Leeson to put up
the better part of the first billion pounds, but getting credible
guarantees for the required other 10 to 50 billion required would be
problematic. Unless you can stop the actuaries opening the files
labelled, Apollo 1, Apollo 13, Bhopal (1984), Challenger, Columbiia,
Chernobyl, 3 mile island, Macmurdo (1958?), Windscale (1957),
Palomares (1966)(2 H bombs), Greenham common (?1? H bomb?),  North
Carolina (it's still there somewhere, they think), ... AND KAL Flight
007, Pan Am Flight 103,  Air NZ Flight 901, Tenerife 1977 (KLM4805,
PanAm 1736 - two for the price of one :-( ), Gimli Glider, Exon
Valdez, BP 2010, ... you may find people wanting underwriting of a
trillion or two. Really. All those events, regardless of the magnitude
of or the responsibility for the outcomes, showed that the human
factor made the impossible possible and/or that Murphy can make
anything go wrong on demand. In many cases hindsight and an expensive
inquiry show that there are things that could and should have been
done differently. But, it keeps on happening and happening and
happening. Flight 901 hit Erebus because about 5 unlikely things all
came together AND the controller at xxx was quite possibly stoned as a
bonus . Apollo 1 took out the A team when it was absolutely blindingly
obvious after the event that it was a triple fatality just waiting to
happen. Macmurdo is powered and heated by diesel. It was not always
so. In 1958 the US scraped up a large amount of dirt surrounding the
previous power station and took the dirt and the remains of the
station back stateside.I have no idea whether this 'incident" had a
human factor cause. That people can decide to put a nuclear reactor
power plant in the world's low temperature ecological showcase and
then allow it to destroy itself suggests people weren't serious
enough. The Gimli Glider incident was far mmore complex than the
populist version suggests - all available on web, but again it was a
long chain of unlikely events with some people factors thrown in. And
on and on. The human factor alone, let alone Murphy, means that your
insurers are going to be horrendously twitchy about getting involved
in an open liability deal where the bill COULD, but almost certainly
never will, run to tens of billions. And, just conceivably maybe
closer to a trillion. MAKING it safe against all the things that
people and Murphy ma do is pretty difficult. But convincing people to
stump up their own risk money to the levels required, that's the hard
part.


Russell
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