1. The energy company pays market rate insurance for their nuclear plants. Not "we take the profit, taxpayers pay for the disaster"
2. The energy company sets up a trust to pay for the safe storage of nuclear waste and cleaning up the plant should they go bust (again "we take ...")
In the current political climate where politicians all over the world compete on subsidizing electricity and fossil fuels to combat the recent price hikes for all poorly insulated home owners and car drivers, who knows what will happen.
That said, no reason why the original deal can't be extended to renewables, seems perfectly fair. It's to everyone's benefit that all methods of power generation be held accountable for all their costs.
Why? Built geographically decoupled production, look at past weather data and pick how many 9's up-time you want.
Then use storage and smart consumers to lower the requirements.
For national emergencies keep a fossil reserve or whatever, with that kind of usage power 2 gas should not even matter.
It's not really that great.
No, it is not the green party who is at fault. This falls fully on the shoulders CDU who was in power for 16 years.
2. Waste storage is a solved problem, even for the current idiotic way we're doing it. Currently, the vast majority of the "waste" is actually unused fuel. Why? Because the fuel is too cheap to make extracting all of it worthwhile.
Imagine you have a situation like the one in Chernobyl: a couple dozen people die. A much larger number of people need to have regular checkups for life, but as a result of said checkups have a normal or slightly longer lifespan.
I’m not sure how health insurance works in Germany, but who pays for the lifetime of checkups? Is the power company liable? Will there be a suit?
The free market rates could fluctuate wildly, but wouldn’t have any relationship to whether nuclear is better than coal.
Also, there’s no guarantee that an a policy would even be offered for more than a year or so. Future insurers might just say, sorry, the admin costs are too much (admin costs could be insane).
2. If the plant goes bust because the government decides to “phase out nuclear” - it’s completely legitimate to ask the government to help with shutdown costs.
And that would be many orders of magnitude higher than the insurance that you are proposing.
And no, CO2 taxes aren't the same (air pollution and global warming are separate things), and even then they are absolutely tiny.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
As far as I have been able to determine this is in fact how nuclear power is run in most of the world. Nuclear power is heavily subsidized by borrowing money from future generations. We are currently entering that future, as for example France has noticed recently. According to recent news stories their operator is 40 bn in debt and needs to make 50bn more in investments to keep plants running, meaning it has charged at least 110 bn too little for the power it sold in decades past.
One of the major downsides of nuclear power is that whenever the nuclear operator runs out of money, taxpayers absolutely have to pay, there is no option not to. From a cynical financial perspective this effectively means nuclear power has limitless credit and can sell power for fantasy pricing, way less than it actually costs.
So to the GP's point, if nuclear had to pay the actual, future costs of the energy it provides today, and it was baked in to the price per kWh it sells on the open market, we'd be better informed about the correct course of action.
So doing that only for nuclear would be an even greater distortion.
2. The topic of the discussion was about atomic energy
3. Yes
Plus no operator is paying for disposal, even if there were a magic place willing to accept the stuff.