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Comment by maelito | Hacker News Reader

Please understand that no electricity generation technology has no risk.

> Think about fat tails and asymmetric risk. If you read in the newspaper next year: "Hundred thousand people dead/displaced due to power plant accident" - more likely to be coal or nuclear?

What's your evaluation of the probability of this event ? Without putting figures in the equation, I could also ask you in the same way to think about this event : if you read in the newspaper next year: "Billions of people dead/displaced due to one in a thousands year drought, leading to global famine" - more likely to be coal or nuclear?

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> more likely to be coal or nuclear

Nuclear. Naive probability matters relatively little here. The risk of coal plants due to CO2 is a thin-tailed long term risk. No single coal plant will ever cause a headline (or an event) like this. Thin-tailed long-term risks can be mitigated and planned for and the result is always a sum of many smaller choices (albeit global warming is an existential risk for sure!).

Nuclear is different. 99,999% of time it's cheaper and cleaner than coal. Doesn't matter. The tail-risk is what matters and that's also, why (conventional) nuclear can't ever be economically competitive against any other power source without direct or indirect subsidies (there is no insurance that will insure a nuclear power plant).

Highly recommend Taleb`s paper on fat-tailedness [1].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10488

There's no insurance that insures a hydro power plant against dam failure either, nor large chemical industries. It's nothing abnormal.

To my knowledge, this depends on the dam in question For large dams in developed countries it's relatively easy to contain that risk (move people a few kilometers away from thedanger zone) in contrast to a nuclear plant. Large chemical industries have no problems getting insurance as far as I know -or do you have credible sources stating otherwise?

I've never heard of countries considering the entire danger zone from a large hydroelectric dam uninhabitable. They're so large that it's simply not feasible. Take the largest hydro station in Sweden for example, Harsprånget[1]. The government assessment for what happens when that dam breaks assumes it takes out a very large geographical area, among other things the entire city of Luleå (which is near the coastline).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harspr%C3%A5nget_hydroelectric...

No large chemical industry handlng dangerous chemicals, in developed countries or otherwise, has an insurance large enough to pay for huge expensive spills. That's why the company usually defaults when it happens and leaves the cleanup for the government later on. This has happened on numerous occations in the US, Europe, and over here in Sweden.

I sincerely don't understand your appreciation of risks. If you have a simpler introduction to this, please share.

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