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Comment by rladd | Hacker News Reader

The only reason there are commercial nuclear power plants in the USA is because their liability was artificially limited to $450M per plant by the Price Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...).

Without that law there wouldn't be any. The law was passed because no insurance company would agree to insure a nuclear plant, precisely because of the crazy exposure if anything went wrong.

I think the insurers have a good point. And that's why I don't think we should subject our civilian population to risks which the experts in risk (actuaries) have decided are so bad that they refused to touch them.

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>their liability was artificially limited to $450M per plant [...] The law was passed because no insurance company would agree to insure a nuclear plant, precisely because of the crazy exposure if anything went wrong.

Is there a reason why coal powerplants which emit pollution (known to cause lung cancer) as part of normal operation aren't liable? It seems like the legal system punishes catastrophic failures, but something like slightly increasing the rate of cancer doesn't get any punishment because the damage is so spread out and not worthwhile to prosecute/sue. Given this, I would argue that coal power plants also have their liabilities "artificially limited".

Alright sure. Coal is also a terrible idea for energy and we also shouldn't be having coal.

Pro nuclear people have this bizarre dichotomy as if it's either Charles Dickens 1840 style coal or Star Trek style nuclear.

In reality, cost in storage and renewables are dropping like Moore's law (they have their own thing called Swanson's law) and even if you did everything right with nuclear you'd be losing money on it in the lifetime of the plant compared to things like wind.

Pennsylvania had a bill recently to keep some nuclear plants open... It would involve an increase in the cost of electricity because it's more expensive.

That's why investors have run away from it. The writing is on the wall. Renewables are increasingly cheaper and easier to deploy and scale and the future trajectories heavily favor them.

The only thing nuclear has is a centralization of power, capital, control, and ownership. You have one robber baron waving his scepter over the entire energy consuming public because nuclear is extraordinarily centralized. It keeps energy being run as feudal monarchies and that's a power the industry doesn't want to cede.

The best is the enemy of the good.

I used to work on design of onshore wind farms. Protecting the public was as simple as measuring the distance to the closest road or building. So that if the turbine failed catastrophically it would not hurt anyone. Add a big red flashing light and aviation is safe. Compare this to nuclear where you need to understand an incredibly complex machine and how it interacts with an unpredictable environment and people. And you need to employ expensive nuclear engineers and scientists to do the work, and then check the work repeatedly. Sounds expensive!

I would love it if nuclear energy could be a success. But why not do wind/solar/battery as well in the meantime.

I certainly agree that large power companies can be unfair to the public. Particularly when renewables has such big upfront costs. It's like renting a house, paying off someone else's mortgage, and never getting to own anything. However, there is a huge benefit in connecting large generators because they are connected to the high voltage transmission system. Power can be exported to where it is needed. In comparison generation that is attached to low voltage networks are more limited in how much can be exported longer distance. Battery storage in particular is much more versatile when used at the grid level.

If there were proper funding into nuclear plants, why wouldn't there also be some kind of reduction in price as new technologies are improved, like we are seeing with renewables?

What about those molten salt thorium reactors from a few years ago that promised we could basically burn dirt to power our cities for forever?

Nuclear has always been subsidized. Way more than renewables and many times that of fossil fuels.

Over $89 billion has been dumped in to it. That's like 20 companies the size of Lyft or Airbnb and it still performs and delivers poorly. How much more do you want?

Maybe, just maybe, it's a fundamentally bad technology and we can do better than nuclear.

https://www.taxpayer.net/energy-natural-resources/nuclear-su...

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