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Comment by woutifier | Hacker News Reader

For nuclear reactor incidents there are reinsurance pools. A collective of insurance companies. For example the nuclear reactor in Borssele, The Netherlands, is insured backed by 26 of such collectives (one national, and 25 foreign collectives) together they consist of over 300 individual insurance companies.

This particular (small) reactor is insured for liability up to 1.2 billion euro.

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The problem is, the followup costs for a nuclear reactor disaster can easily reach multiple trillions of euros - and no plant is adequately insured. In Germany, they did the maths [1] in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster and found out that decent insurance would cost 72 billion euros a year in premiums - a move that would raise electricity prices from 20 ct/kWh to 4 euros/kWh.

We have been ignoring that massive risk in favor of "cheap" electricity for decades, and every time something happened, in the end the taxpayers had to cover the bill.

Nuclear simply is financially unviable once externalities are properly accounted for. Add to that cost and time overruns in projects, the still unsolved questions of where to dump the waste, of nuclear weapon fuel proliferation... and just forget about fission-based nuclear projects, please.

[1] https://www.manager-magazin.de/finanzen/versicherungen/a-761...

Yes, but, you could also say the same of fossil fuel power plants as well. The world has been getting "cheap" electricity from fossil fuels for many decades now while ignoring the environmental (and other, like nuclear waste problems from Coal) externalities that taxpayers ultimately have to face one way or another as well. You'd need a comparative analysis of the externalities of both to make sense of the trade-offs and pick one that's "better".

Renewables like solar and wind are great of course, but they're intermittent and cause weird issues like the Duck Curve. You still need base load from either nuclear or fossil fuels for a stable, reliable grid.

> the still unsolved questions of where to dump the waste

This isn't an unsolved problem, just an uneconomical one - there isn't enough waste for any of the possible solutions to be economical. The solution to getting rid of nuclear waste, is to produce enough of it to make R&D worthwhile.

> of nuclear weapon fuel proliferation

But how does this relate to power plants? The military will get its nukes, whether or not the plants are built.

> But how does this relate to power plants? The military will get its nukes, whether or not the plants are built.

The problem is that the plutonium will be created in the first place and needs to be taken extra care of to make sure the stuff doesn't get stolen or "misplaced" and then diverted off to terrorists.

Given Chernobyl cost about around 235 billion USD to cleanup - What constitutes "decent insurance"? How much are they expecting to pay out?

It's not just the direct cleanup costs - the number goes up extremely hard if you also attempt to account for externalized costs that are rarely grouped together:

- loss of life and the economic productivity of people who died early (not just the liquidators, but also everyone who got radiation damage!)

- loss of sellability of goods - to this day, Bavarian shroom collectors and hunters have to check fungi or wild animals for radiation, and in particularly bad years up to 70% of wild pigs have to be discarded due to irradiation [1]. That's an economic loss for the hunters and for all subsequent economic activities (butchers, restaurants).

- healthcare cost associated with dealing with the fallout - cancers are the most expensive illnesses known to mankind

- loss of quality of life in those who were displaced by the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters, additionally also the cost of relocating and the loss of opportunities, social networks etc. caused by the relocating

- loss of economic potential that could have been realized in the area around Chernobyl, had it not been contaminated

[1] https://www.welt.de/wissenschaft/article230648425/35-Jahre-n...

But are these the kinds of costs that are accounted for by an insurer? Have local hunters/butchers/restaurants managed to get compensation for loss of revenue?

Also, these costs seem specific to a melt-down. Fukushima wasn't just poorly insured, it failed to heed studies warning about its location.

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