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Comment by crdoconnor | Hacker News Reader

Three questions that I have never had satisfactorily answered by nuclear advocates:

* If nuclear is that safe, why don't we eliminate or at least, significantly raise the nuclear liability cap? The nuclear industry keeps trying to sell us (this article included) on the idea that disasters are now close to impossible. It'd be an easier sell if they voluntarily increased their liability, to, say $150-400 billion and found private insurers willing to take a risk on their safety, no?

* Did you personally consider Japan's nuclear plants unsafe before Fukushima? (as far as I can tell it took most of us by surprise)

* If the strike price for Hinkley point electricity is 1.5x-2x renewable strike price today (never mind in 10 years when renewable prices have plunged again), what exactly was so great about building a "next gen" nuclear plant?

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A) The reason why the liability cap don't follow rational argument is that policy does not follow rational arguments. Politics dictate that and just like with airport security, security management is about the perceived risk rather than true risk.

B) Transparency is not great when it come to power plants. It is impossible for citizens to make a informed decisions about which countries has safe power plants and which are unsafe.

C) The environmentalist argument is not that renewable electricity is worse than nuclear, but that we still burn material and put co2 into the air for power and heat. Even in a place like Sweden, we still sometimes burn coal. If we could ban all such usage without building more nuclear than great, but we don't look like we are any nearer a ban on burning gas, oil and coal today than when renewable prices was prohibitive expensive. Nuclear power plants directly replace other power plants, while wind and solar seems mostly just supplement the market with cheaper electricity during good conditions while coal keep burning when the wind is calm and the sun is set.

Fukushima didn’t have any serious human or ecological costs, compared to accepted industry norms for fossil fuels. It looked bad, but did not cause serious damage. Coal has done far worse to Japan and it is accepted.

I don't know what a strike price or a Hinkley point is, but if you're saying that it's more expensive than some other renewables, then the issue is still: we can't build enough renewables (in some countries it's physically impossible, in others you'd have to appropriate a lot of land for power production, and in a small number of exceptions the only issue is expenses) so price will have to go up in order to save mankind. I mean, we can haggle over prices, but that's what we're talking about. I'm not advocating nuclear because I see other options, I'm advocating it because I see no other options.

Fukushima was before I was into the topic. I really can't say anything either way, except to parrot what others say: it was tech from the 60s and they built it on a major fault line.

I haven't read up on insurance for nuclear reactors, so I can't say much about that either. Again, though, even if it's dangerous, I don't see a way out that does not include dependency by all countries on solar power from the Saharah and similar places, or nuclear power. Assuming it's somewhere in the middle between the current safety levels and the claimed ones for newer designs, we should not exclude nuclear. It's also not as if we would build 1000 reactors worldwide simultaneously. Some will be built earlier than others and we'll learn more about their safety, allowing us to steer whether we want to appropriate more land for renewables or continue building more reactors.

These seem like very reasonable questions to me. Is this comment just getting downvoted because pro-nuclear HNers don’t like the opinions being expressed, or can someone legitimately justify the negative comment score I’m currently seeing?

For #1, insurance relies on the law of large numbers. If you expect an average of less than one event per whatever time, it stops being insurance and becomes either gambling or just an escrow account.

Pro nuke here advocating for advanced reactors. I agree that we should get rid of Price Anderson.

Give me a billion and I'll write you a policy for $400b. No problemo!

Is this you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_R._Greenberg :) ?

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