4 ms·

I have also not been able to find relyable datapoints on the total insurance cost of a nuclear fascility. I'd love to talk to someone in the insurance industry

by kriro 4y ago

I have also not been able to find relyable datapoints on the total insurance cost of a nuclear fascility. I'd love to talk to someone in the insurance industry how they calculate this because that'll probably be a decent indicator of the risk involved.

Gwypaas 4y ago
It is not possible to insure a nuclear power plant. The Fukushima cleanup is currently estimated to be somewhere in the range of $200B - $1T. [1] For US the insurance is capped at $450M per site and $131M per reactor because that's what been decided that the market can bear. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup [2]: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/nuclear-insurance.html https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n...
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
  Fukushima is an exercise in politics. They've already killed several hundred people in the name of politics, I haven't seen data on what the cleanup entails but I suspect it's as stupid as the evacuation. (Hint: The expected death toll from staying put was zero.) The problem is nuke plants generally produce no hazard and rarely make a mess--and we go insane about said mess. We don't do much of anything about the much greater deaths from the other sources because they're more distributed and thus not noticed. Instead of obsessing about maximum safety and cleanup etc, what we should be doing is saying nuke plants must have a better safety profile than their closest competitor--note that that is natural gas which currently has 100x the death rate. (Wind and solar are intermittent, until you count the storage systems you don't have a number at all. Hydro is capacity-limited. Biomass is limited.) And I think the chart in the article is allocating the Fukushima evacuation deaths to nuclear rather than to the politicians.

by kriro 4y ago

Gwypaas 4y ago

It is not possible to insure a nuclear power plant. The Fukushima cleanup is currently estimated to be somewhere in the range of $200B - $1T. [1] For US the insurance is capped at $450M per site and $131M per reactor because that's what been decided that the market can bear. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup [2]: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/nuclear-insurance.html https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n...

LorenPechtel 4y ago
Fukushima is an exercise in politics. They've already killed several hundred people in the name of politics, I haven't seen data on what the cleanup entails but I suspect it's as stupid as the evacuation. (Hint: The expected death toll from staying put was zero.) The problem is nuke plants generally produce no hazard and rarely make a mess--and we go insane about said mess. We don't do much of anything about the much greater deaths from the other sources because they're more distributed and thus not noticed. Instead of obsessing about maximum safety and cleanup etc, what we should be doing is saying nuke plants must have a better safety profile than their closest competitor--note that that is natural gas which currently has 100x the death rate. (Wind and solar are intermittent, until you count the storage systems you don't have a number at all. Hydro is capacity-limited. Biomass is limited.) And I think the chart in the article is allocating the Fukushima evacuation deaths to nuclear rather than to the politicians.