> The free market would never, ever, ever have built a single plant if 99.9% of the insurance costs weren't fully socialized, however.
People do make arguments like this, but when considering 2nd order effects it is a weak argument. The same argument could be made for fossil fuels (which have substantial negative externalities) and powered all the gains humanity made in the last 2 centuries - demonstrating that the positive externalities are far higher than the negative.
The issue with nuclear is that the costs come in very clear events, where for most industrial schemes (like solar, coal or wind) the costs are extremely diffuse and are largely ignored. But it doesn't make sense to start pinning the problems on nuclear when the costs are probably smaller than the alternatives. There are some question marks when compared to solar and wind, but reliable generation capacity is worth quite a lot and people aren't taking the waste products of producing renewable energy seriously. (which sounds like a whine - but if we're going to go crazy about the issue of minute amounts of nuclear waste as people do then we can't give heavy metals a free pass! Or what they put in batteries)
> ...cost of cleaning up 1 Fukushima....
Raising the question of whether the response to Fukushima was appropriate. The response we typically take (again, citing fossil fuels) is to ignore rare problems when they are too expensive to fix. It is enough to swap in a technology that is much better than status-quo. It doesn't need to be perfect.
This part of argument that sounds good, but doesn't actually hold up vs an inspection of what we currently treat as acceptable in the real world. The damage of Fukushima left without remediation is less than damage nations currently accept without blinking. Just a little more concentrated.
> Especially when solar, wind and storage are all way way cheaper even before insurance risks are taken into account.
They said that before the Energiewende too, and now Germany is probably going to need to source some lubricant so that they can be comfortable while Russia has its way with the European energy grid. This pro-renewable argument has a long history of turning out not to be true when tested in reality and exposed to the actual demand people have for reliable power.
It turns out that "renewables are cheaper" - which was said when they started shutting down nuclear plants - was code for "we're going to buy a lot of nat gas". With discouraging results.