> The cleanup cost was $1B which is negligible. “1 billion dollars” is not negligible when your company is paying it either directly or through insurance. They

> The cleanup cost was $1B which is negligible. “1 billion dollars” is not negligible when your company is paying it either directly or through insurance. They also lost a nuclear reactor (~$2.5 billion in 2018 dollars to build - depreciation) and lost revenue, so they were out far more than just 1B. Worse this isn’t a one off event, every single nuclear reactor was facing the same issue. Just from a pure economic perspective if someone says you need to spend say 20-30 m/year to avoid losing your nuclear power plant and paying 1B on top of this your going to do some internal calculations and figure out how much maintenance is worth 1B dollars and frankly it’s a lot of maintenance. But now every single nuclear reactor is now paying more every year on maintenance forever. The industry just got more expensive seemingly from thin air thus 3 mile island cost the nuclear industry a lot more than just what was spent on the island. Worse the same thing happens after basically every expensive incident. Almost never does the industry look at an expensive accident and say well that’s just the cost of doing business we don’t need to change anything. Which then means every year it just keeps getting more expensive.