Comment by the_why_of_y | Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_why_of_y | Hacker News Reader

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So a nuclear accident in the US is only insured up to ~$13 billion?

The numbers I can find on the cost of the Fukushima Daiichi accident are higher than that (and I wonder how reliable they are):

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/08/opinion/playing-pass-the-...

Japan’s leaders hope to restore for human habitation more than 100 cities, towns and villages scattered over hundreds of square miles. The government has allocated more than $15 billion for this work.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jan/31/possible...

In December, the government said the estimated cost of decommissioning the plant and decontaminating the surrounding area, as well as paying compensation and storing radioactive waste, had risen to 21.5 trillion yen ($187bn), nearly double an estimate released in 2013.

(Interestingly, Wikipedia claims that the insurance policies that applied to Fukushima Daiichi specifically excluded accidents caused by earthquake/tsumani.)

Of course, with insufficient insurance coverage, when faced with a major accident the company owning the plant will just declare bankruptcy and leave the tax payer to pay for the mess.

So we have another case of "privatize the profits, socialize the losses", which IMHO is one of the biggest problems with nuclear energy, and is effectively a subsidy that keeps the price artificially low.

> So a nuclear accident in the US is only insured up to ~$13 billion?

Yes, and we've never come anywhere near paying that out. So I'd call that not just a win, but a highly profitable business.

> Of course, with insufficient insurance coverage, when faced with a major accident the company owning the plant will just declare bankruptcy and leave the tax payer to pay for the mess.

>So we have another case of "privatize the profits, socialize the losses", which IMHO is one of the biggest problems with nuclear energy, and is effectively a subsidy that keeps the price artificially low.

Except this isn't what's happening. Because we have privatized the losses. Hence the insurance. But we have also always socialized the losses from natural disasters, frankly because natural disasters affect a society and not a singular organization.

> In December, the government said the estimated cost of decommissioning the plant and decontaminating the surrounding area, as well as paying compensation and storing radioactive waste, had risen to 21.5 trillion yen ($187bn), nearly double an estimate released in 2013.

> (Interestingly, Wikipedia claims that the insurance policies that applied to Fukushima Daiichi specifically excluded accidents caused by earthquake/tsumani.)

So it looks like the whole earthquake event was over $400bn (real dollars)[0]. So that's almost half. (And we're referencing Wikipedia, so we're not diving into the numbers too far). Side note: this makes that event more expensive than Chernobyl.

But here's something to consider. Look again at that table and look at what is happening in recent years. In 2017 the US spent over $200bn on natural disasters that are directly linked to climate change. These events are just becoming more common and only a small part of the cost that we are paying for increasing the planet's temperature. Over the last decade we've (the US) paid for several Fukushimas. These are all being paid by the taxpayers too.

Yes, nuclear accidents are costly (they are also extremely rare and getting more rare) but are they more costly than what happens if we don't use them? In either case we're taking a gamble, there's just no other way to put it. But which horse are you going to put your money on?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disasters_by_cost

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