3 ms·
When a major nuclear disaster happens, it can cause hundreds of billions of damage. To make it worse from a liability perspective, that damage can be attributed
by jltsiren 2y ago
When a major nuclear disaster happens, it can cause hundreds of billions of damage. To make it worse from a liability perspective, that damage can be attributed to a specific power plant.
We know from natural disasters that insurance is usually insufficient to cover the true damage. Either governments have to step in, or the victims have to bear the costs. If the government has to pay for damages but someone else pays for safety features, there are clear incentives for overregulation.
The company operating the reactor obviously cannot pay. As long as shareholders are shielded from liability, it's easy enough to structure the company to ensure that it has no major assets beyond the power plant.
- scarab92 2y agoIt's overall beneficial for society to switch to nuclear. The problem you posed is just a market structure implementation detail. Government could operate the plants, or they could offer insurance to private sector operators.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- vasco 2y agoI'm pro-nuclear but the idea that insurance fixes everything is strange to me. How much insurance money fixes you getting killed, would you say?
- boxedemp 2y agoI missed where they say insurance solves everything. I understood it as the government running it solves many of the issues introduced by the private sector, and the insurance was another thought.
- tbrownaw 2y agoThis is not a novel question. If someone gets killed at work, how much do they get from workers' comp? What is a micromort and how much does one usually sell for? What did weregeld used to be back when it was still a thing?
- vasco 2y agoI didn't ask about an unspecified someone else, I asked about yourself. It makes a big difference to understand what I meant.
- fsflover 2y agoNuclear kills less people than almost any other source.
- ZeroGravitas 2y agoThough probably not the two main modern rivals, wind and solar, which are also cheaper (and lives and money are, at a very abstract level, interchangeable). I've not seen numbers updated with the latest data, the old data had them basically drawn on death per TWh and in the time between that data being gathered solar and wind have gone from a rounding error even when combined to each individual predcited to generate more than nuclear next year, so double nuclear generation per year and still accelerating away from it. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
- fsflover 2y agoExcept nobody can survive solely on solar and wind. There must be another, stable energy source for the quiet nights.
- kergonath 2y ago> When a major nuclear disaster happens, it can cause hundreds of billions of damage. Fossil fuels also cause hundreds of billions of damage, simply when being used, no need for accidents. Your argument is useful, because it highlights that we are better equipped to deal with a predictable level of damage than rare events. But overall, having more nuclear plants and using less fossil fuels over a couple of decades would have left us better off by billions of dollars.