Comment by smcl
3 days ago
> A 2016 estimate said the overall cost of the Chernobyl disaster was US$700 billion ...
You're taking 30 years worth of expenses and comparing them to the UK tax intake for one year. I am pretty certain the USSR didn't pay for all that up-front.
So $700b over 30 years is about $23b/year. The UK gov budget for the year you selected was about $1045b[1]. So if we are to take your Chernobyl example, it's about 2% of GDP per year. That is roughly half of what was spent on the second-smallest sector of the budget - "Public order and safety". That is a lot of money! But you're implying it would cause the collapse of the UK altogether.
As a comparison, during the 07/08 financial crisis the UK government bailed out the banks to the tune of $185b and managed to not collapse...
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/budget-2016-docum...
> You're taking 30 years worth of expenses and comparing them to the UK tax intake for one year. I am pretty certain the USSR didn't pay for all that up-front.
Didn't pay all of it ever, that's also the damages of other affected nations after the collapse of the USSR.
So, there was a de-facto if not de-jure default on that cost.
> As a comparison, during the 07/08 financial crisis the UK government bailed out the banks to the tune of $185b and managed to not collapse...
It also owned some of the banks as a result (I was personally affected by this, LLOY shares), it wasn't just a pure cost.
I note that neither of those comments invalidate my point that this would not cause the collapse of the UK ...
They are only intended to show that it is a real possibility by analogy with what happened to the USSR following Chernobyl. It would require a detailed simulation to elevate this from "vibe" to "a clear risk percentage".
I do not have sufficient grounding in any of the relevant fields to create such a simulation, so I'm limited to drawling circles on a map around the reactors, seeing what's inside, and making a best-guess as to the consequences informed more by world news than anything more precise.
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