Madam Speaker, I do not have an exact answer to my colleague's question, but I believe that significant government funding is involved in the decommissioning and cleanup of the Hanford site in Washington State. It is $2 billion a year for decades, not just for a decade, not just for a couple of years, but for decades, to clean up that site. It also requires other kinds of specialized facilities, such as the vitrification plant, which is an additional $12 billion.
None of these costs are insignificant. They are huge costs. Whether they are costs to industry, to the taxpayer or to government, they are huge costs. It goes to show that we do not fully appreciate the true costs of this industry when we do not understand how much it could potentially cost to deal with an accident and when we do not understand how much it truly costs to deal with the remediation of a retired nuclear facility of any kind.
We could look at the kind of remediation effort that has to happen at a gasoline filling station that has been closed. We often see the structure being torn down and the tanks being removed, but then the fence goes up and testing goes on for biohazards that continue. That site stays vacant for some period of time while that remediation goes on. We are talking about a gasoline filling station and not a nuclear facility with all of the extra, and more serious perhaps, concerns about waste, leakages and other problems that may have occurred on that nuclear facility site.
When I compare the process of remediating a filling station site to what is required of the nuclear industry in the event of the retirement of a facility or an accident, it behooves us to make sure that we have in place the best possible regime to deal with liability and compensation that we can possibly construct.
Bill C-20 falls far short of that, especially when we look at the costs associated, and when we look at the examples from other nations around the world. Some of the countries that we look to, for example, on how to deal with various issues, countries like Germany and Japan and even in this case, countries like the United States, have set far higher and even unlimited in the case of Germany and Japan, compensation limits in the event of an accident at a nuclear facility.
We need to look at that very carefully and try to find ways to avoid passing that cost on to the taxpayers, should there be an accident or should there be a retirement of a facility.