Its actually kind of like nuclear power. The electricity isn't more dangerous to consumers, but observation of the mortal nature of man lead to the conclusion that it'd be better to keep corporations away from it.
Similar to car massive amount of death (not even going into secondary and tertiary effects) and nobody bats an eye, even if they know personally somebody who died like that. Yet every single plane crash and tons of folks are getting panic attacks.
Human psychology fascinates me, but at the same time makes me outright sad. So much potential often wasted on utter stupidities, and even worse - its trivial for skilled people to manipulate masses into literally shooting off their own feet with 12 gauge shotgun buckshot, just play the fear tune well enough for long enough.
Climate change, nuclear weapons, bio threats, and runaway AI all pose immense risks, at scales that are hard to reason about intuitively. Hopefully we develop ways to better manage current and future risks before a big one blows up.
Even more remarkable, the fact that nuclear is kept out of the hands of corporations, but the oil industry is not might have been the cause that the latter put so much money and effort into the nuclear fear campaign.
More people die of fossil fuel air pollution per year than have died of COVID. We might have saved more lives during the lock down by the reduction in pollution than the actual virus containment.
Stranger still, alcohol is still legal even though there's "no safe level of consumption"[1].
[1] https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-...
Is this a count or a statistic?
Meanwhile, an actual control experiment could easily be conducted anywhere on earth, and is never even approached by these "model only scientists."
American nuclear plants are ran by corporations.
P.S. if you are wondering what's wrong with allowing corporations to take on endeavors with a risk of causing large amounts of damage, it's because the value of a company isn't allowed to go negative due to bankruptcy and the corporate veil. If you're able to incorporate, you can profit from a series of "-$1,000 if I lose, +$1 if I win," bets, because creating $1000 liabilities on an entity with no money in the bank costs little more than the equipment you'd be forced to liquidate.
Hiding a Chernobyl-scale nuclear disaster would be far more difficult today; even in China, total news blackouts are a lot more difficult to pull off than they used to be. And the designs in use are inherently a lot safer and more conservative than the RBMK type (which was really pretty innovative and impressive for the time, if you ignore the unfortunate tendency to explode, but certainly _not_ conservative).
they would try but it would leak one way or another. Simply too many people involved...
Chernobyl was the result of an insane reactor design (positive void coefficient of reactivity and no secondary containment) which then had uncontrolled experiments run on it during operation. Nobody is going to repeat that bonehead move.
I believe there are still 7 (retrofitted) RBMK reactors in use today. Kursk-3 and 4, Leningrad-3 and 4, and Smolensk 1-3. Last one won't be shut down until 2034.
Maybe not that exact one, but curious humans continue to do boneheaded stuff.
Don't insurance companies solve this problem? Require the nuclear corporation to have liability insurance by regulation. Then the liability is shifted to an underwriter who has much more diversified risk.
The risks of nuclear power are still largely unknown, as there have been only two major disasters over a few decades. Both of them cost ~$200 billion, at least according to some estimates. We don't know how much worse the reasonable worst case could be. Chernobyl and Fukushima were also one-off disasters with specific causes. Insurance companies would also have to be prepared for multiple disasters in a short period of time caused by systemic issues in the design of a particular reactor type.
No, the risks of nuclear power are very well known, as there have been only two major disasters over quite a few decades, and the root causes of both of them are well known and easily avoidable.
> We don't know how much worse the reasonable worst case could be.
Yes, we do. We know that Chernobyl was worse than any reasonable worst case for any other reactor, because nobody is going to build another reactor with a positive void coefficient of reactivity and with no secondary containment, and then run uncontrolled experiments on it. And we know that Fukushiman was a reasonable worst case, because it subjected a just shut down reactor to zero decay heat removal for an extended period, and that is going to be the consequence of the worst possible accident that could happen to a running reactor, since any such accident will shut the reactor down.
In other words, in a sane world, the risks of nuclear power would be more insurable than the risks of, say, coal power, precisely because the nuclear risks are contained. No insurance company is going to sign up to liability for deaths due to respiratory failure from breathing coal dust over a period of many years. But in our insane world, we don't hold anyone accountable for such risks, so we end up treating nuclear, which is far safer per unit of energy generated than any source except solar, as if it were the riskiest of all sources.
I think the statement that you were responding to would be better phrased as: "The risks of nuclear power are still largely unknown, since there have been only two major disasters over a few decades." Insurance companies are typically okay with insuring against high cost, high frequency occurrences as long as they can quantify it. If they can quantify it, they can set a price on it.
It is also worth noting that insurance companies were among the first adopters of digital computers because the better they can quantify frequencies and costs, the better they can set rates.
That was how I interpreted the statement when I responded to it.
> Insurance companies are typically okay with insuring against high cost, high frequency occurrences as long as they can quantify it.
Insurance companies are also good at specifying insurable risks and providing incentives to the insured to manage them properly, even for rare but high cost events. That includes refusing to insure people who the insurance companies judge to not have good judgment. For example, no sane insurance company would ever have insured Chernobyl given its insane reactor design, nor would any insurance company have agreed to pay a claim when they found that the reactor operator ran an uncontrolled experiment on the reactor and that was what caused the accident.
As for Fukushima, as I commented elsewhere upthread, an insurer covering a reactor in an earthquake/tsunami zone would probably either not include tsunami inundation coverage in the policy, or would require a separate rider that would be priced separately. And such a rider would also have a list of requirements for coverage, which would include things like "don't site your backup power and switchgear where a tsunami might inundate it".
In other words, as I pointed out, the risks of nuclear power are well known, because we understand how reactors work and what the failure modes are and insurers therefore know how to write policies that set the right incentives for managing risk. That is true even though we have had only two major disasters over quite a few decades; in fact, as I pointed out, the fact that we have had only two such disasters, and both of them were due to root causes that are easily avoidable in the future, is a reason to be more confident that the risks are well understood and insurable.
The list of all of these nuclear incidents is interesting, many of them seem to be various components of the system exploding for various reasons, which could have led to horrible outcomes but luckily did not: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accide...
No, it wasn't. In fact, the plant operators made just about every possible mistake they could have made--and still no harm to the general public. TMI was actually an illustration of how good design of safety systems can protect the general public even when reactor operators make multiple bonehead mistakes. Unfortunately the media narrative, as in so many other cases, drastically misrepresented what actually happened.
> and upon further review had more radiation escape than was initially disclosed.
Yes, but still zero harm to the general public.
> many of them seem to be various components of the system exploding for various reasons, which could have led to horrible outcomes but luckily did not
I do not see any incidents with commercial power reactors that fit this description.
A reasonable worst case is something that could plausibly happen once in a century in the entire world with 10x more reactors than today. Maybe the reactor is located close to a major city. Maybe the company operating it has become incompetent and corrupt. Maybe the weather conditions are particularly unfavorable and most of the fallout goes towards the city. Maybe the meltdown was caused by a natural disaster that also makes evacuating the city harder. Maybe there are also widespread protests happening for an unrelated reason.
Or maybe the worst case is the incompetent and corrupt power company upgrading its reactors in a way that leads to a large number of meltdowns.
Remember that we are talking about what happens when the power company cannot pay and we don't want to socialize the risks. This is not something where the insurance company is allowed to set the terms. If courts and/or politicians ultimately determine that the power company is liable for $1 trillion, but its assets were only worth $100 billion, the insurance company must cover the rest.
The damage from coal (not risk because the risk is technically 0 - the bad outcome is guaranteed by design) is substantially greater than the risk of a nuclear disaster. We just don't hold anyone liable for fossil fuel damage because then society would collapse. It is pretty stupid that we don't move to nuclear and highlights the inability of the anti-nuclear crowd to do cost-benefit analysis.
I believe there is a gap in the market for a new type of insurance company which regulates/inspects the insured to reduce the risks (and hence increase their profit margins while premiums get lower).
Ah well. I'm just glad that renewables are finally moving forward. Better late than never.
Most likely too late as we kept burning fossil fuels too long and we are now facing the danger of civilization-ending climate change. All thanks to doomer propaganda like whatshisface's.
Amazing how powerful fear is - to manipulate and keep people down.
And that's before we get to all of the other subsidies, cataloged here: https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/nuclear-power-still-not-via...
I'm a big fan of free and fair markets, and think that they have been woefully underapplied in recent decades. Happily there's an uptick in antitrust regulation, so maybe we're moving in the right direction.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FDA_preemption [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riegel_v._Medtronic,_Inc.
From what I've seen, I think things like the Price-Anderson Act are less about universal liability protections for regulated activities, and more about special pleading by people with money. It seems to me that the correct response for "this is so dangerous nobody will insure it" is not "well fuck it, go ahead and the government will cover your losses."
While I'm no fan of this act on general principles and would be fine with seeing it repealed, to call it a "massive subsidy" ignores the fact that, as the Wikipedia article you link to notes, the secondary insurance provided under it has never been used. Every claim has been within the amount of primary insurance coverage, which is bought on the open insurance market at normal rates. This is strong evidence that nuclear power is in fact an ordinary insurable risk and the government does not need to take measures like this act.
The subsidy here is the price difference between having full insurance and price of only having to insure to the cap, cumulatively since 1957, for every nuclear plant in the US. It's hard to put a number on that, but it's wildly larger than zero.
Yes, and the root cause is well known and easily avoidable, so any insurer can simply require that it is not present in an insured system--in this case, that backup generators and switchgear for decay heat removal are sited where they can't be inundated by a tsunami. Exactly as the backup generators and switchgear for all other reactors at the same site were.
In fact, that very observation highlights a problem with the absence of insurance: nobody was independently checking for exposure to risk. An insurer would have asked why the backup generators and switchgear for that one reactor were sited differently from all the others at the site before agreeing to provide coverage.
Also, insurance is not necessarily blanket coverage for everything at a single price. An insurer of a reactor might not include tsunami inundation in the policy--or might require a separate rider, priced separately, for that particular risk, which will have a different risk profile than other risks associated with the reactor.
> The subsidy here is the price difference between having full insurance and price of only having to insure to the cap
While this was true back in 1957, when there was no real data on commercial nuclear reactor operational risks, that is not the case now and has not been the case for quite some time. I would expect the fact that no claims have gone over the cap for decades to be reflected in pricing for insurance up to the cap being basically the same as it would be for insurance to a higher maximum liability.
OTOH, if insurance for this particular risk is not a very competitive market--which it might well not be precisely because of government interference in this area--then the "subsidy" the government is providing is just canceling out what would otherwise be an unwarranted increase in premiums by insurers who effectively have monopoly pricing power.
All that said, I'll reiterate that I would be fine with having this law repealed and letting nuclear compete in a free market with other energy sources--of course provided that we treat all those other energy sources the same and the government does not favor or penalize any of them. I just think that nuclear would do better in such a regime than many others appear to think.
Your belief is that American insurers carefully check not only that particular risk but all other potentially catastrophic risks for every reactor they insure? I'd like to know the basis for that belief.
> I would expect the fact that no claims have gone over the cap for decades to be reflected in pricing for insurance up to the cap being basically the same as it would be for insurance to a higher maximum liability.
I see. And what's your expertise such that your personal belief is relevant to what actually happens here?
Another way risks of nuclear are underestimated are compound effects over long durations. A million years and a thousand years are easily grouped together under very long, but at a incidence of once per thousand years it's the difference between 1 and 1000.
"The other source which is heavily influenced by a few large-scale accidents is hydropower. Its death rate since 1965 is 1.3 deaths per TWh. This rate is almost completely dominated by one event: the Banqiao Dam Failure in China in 1975. It killed approximately 171,000 people. Otherwise, hydropower was very safe, with a death rate of just 0.04 deaths per TWh – comparable to nuclear, solar, and wind." [1]
While there are reasons for and against nuclear and hydro, their safety difference is not material.
Here’s some data from just Scotland: https://scotlandagainstspin.org/turbine-accident-statistics/
Your link shows ~200 from wind turbines.
As your link shows the direct deaths were around 78. Everything else beyond that is a statistical estimate, and the more anti-nuclear the group running the numbers is, the exponentially larger the "death toll." The largest estimate came in at a staggering 985,000 -- despite there only being 350,000 people in what is now the CEZ.
No it's not (putting aside that they seem to be a bunch of anti-wind cranks).
> Total number of accidents: 3493
If you drill into the PDF they link to:
> 3493 Miscellaneous 31/12/2023 Whispering Willow North windpower facility, Franklin County, Iowa USA
Last I looked, the USA hasn't been part of the UK in almost 250 years.
But also their data is nonsense - they've counted one turbine catching fire as two separate incidents, and conveniently ignore that it was during a named storm when the turbine was exposed to winds gusting >70 knots and thousands of people lost power due to downed power lines [0].
Even if you take their number as gospel, which seems unwise given they're counting this as an accident:
> "World's biggest wind farm makes bid to force land sales". Report that SSE Renewables, owners of the Berwick Bank wind farm project off the cost of East Lothian, Scotland, are seeking to force landowners to sell land to operators of the Berwick Bank project.
> Their application to Scottish Ministers to use a Compulsory Purchase Order for lands has brought a stream of objections from private land owners, Network Rail, and EDF who operate Torness nuclear plant. The application will now go to public enquiry.
The FT [1] claims 2202 deaths due to Fukushima:
> There were 2,202 disaster-related deaths in Fukushima, according to the government’s Reconstruction Agency, from evacuation stress, interruption to medical care and suicide
0: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/binaries/content/assets/metoffi...
1: https://www.ft.com/content/000f864e-22ba-11e8-add1-0e8958b18...
If a nuclear accident killed 10k people tomorrow that still wouldn’t really change my mind.
Nothing is in the final product, and there is no worker contact except around every 10 years as the cell is replaced.