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Comment by niemandhier | Hacker News Reader

People usually do not include the costs of actual insurance into those calculations. If you do you end up with much higher prices per kWh for nuclear.

Additional cost estimate in numbers per kWh

Numbers:

Germany: + 0.139€-2.36 €/kWh

Japan: + $0.22–5.78/kWh

I could not find numbers for the US, but you guys have the Price-Anderson Act that limits the liability of nuclear operators.

Sources:

https://www.versicherungsforen.net/schaden-leistung/berechnu...

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/12/1301

https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF1082...

The German study is not undisputed, but the opposing side was funded by nuclear industry, while the original study was done by insurance providers and aligns with the Japanese results.

Neither study considered terror, or hybrid warfare as additional risks.

Given the amount of sabotage we see in Europe at the moment, premiums would probably be even higher.

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Are large hydro dams insured for the total costs of catastrophic flood event?

A typical third-party liability insurance cap for large hydroelectric dams ranges from $50 million to $100 million per occurrence, with major facilities stacking excess liability layers well beyond that.

Dam failures can cause very large costs. The 2015 Fundão tailings dam breach:

" On 25 October 2024, mining companies BHP and Vale signed an agreement with the Brazilian government to pay nearly US$30 billion in compensation over the Mariana Dam collapse. The terms include $18 billion in funding for public authorities and $5.6 billion in additional compensation, resettlement, and environment restoration. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_dam_disaster#Governmen...

1975 Banqiao Dam failure, Deaths 26,000–240,000. Property damage: 62 dams collapsed, more than 5 million houses collapsed, 10.75 million people affected

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

For sabotage in Europe, I would be much more worry about security of hydro dams, chemical facilities and water supply. They are much more weakly protected then nuclear power plants.

https://www.nrc.gov/regulations-legislation/fact-sheets-broc...

In Ukraine a large dam was destroyed, you can see it from space. Terrible, but things moved on.

Things would not move on as smoothly if Chernobyl containment was bombed.

It was bombed, and things moved on even more smoothly.

There was not only massive amounts of ecological damage due to russian destruction of the Kakhovka Dam (which was a war crime), but also at least 59 people died. This would be impossible at Chornobyl because nobody lives around it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_the_Kakhovka_Da...

I'm not saying destroying the chornobyl sarcophagus would be great, but it wouldn't cause the same amount of damage.

No, it's included and is dirt cheap. German nuclear provided for about 5ct/kwh, similar to Switzerland https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte... or other countries.

In Germany liability was covering 2.5bn+ full assets of owners. I still find it funny how germans are concerned about nuclear when each 2y the same nr of ppl die as total estimation for Chernobyl (if we assume LNT is correct at low dosages). Yet nobody demands full cars ban. Even funnier considering Germany is still burning coal and approved subsidies for new gas peakers

Your document shows 10.9 ct/kWh normalised production cost for 2025 (roughly double the ~5 ct of a normal year, because the plant was offline half the year). That shows how exposed such a plant is when it's offline; and running an existing, paid-off plant built in the 1970s, like the one you linked, is a very different thing from building a new one today.

Burning coal sure is stupid, but so is being stuck in the outdated idea that we need either coal or nuclear for baseload. Solar, wind and storage are much cheaper, more flexible and far faster to build (a year or two, not 15+). IMO that's a much better answer than starting some SMR pipe dream now. 10 or 20 years ago it would have been different, but there's no point clinging to a solution just because it made sense back then, and was rejected for the wrong reasons.

So you see that avg opex price is cheap, thanks for acknowledging. That was the statement, not that in new plants power is more expensive because they need to repay loan (which is balooned due to delays)

We need firm power. This isn't outdated. That's also why Germany approved subsidies for new gas plants, which were recommended even by Fraunhofer ISE

Basically either you build a mix like france/nordics and get very low emissions or you are stuck with vre+bess+gas combo like Germany.

Or, if you are convinced VRE are enough, provide an estimation/simulation for German grid based on existing data of last decade (capacity factors/demand)- how much vre+bess is needed to ditch firm fossils fully

I agree with everything you said but want to add some more about the Price-Anderson Act. It does a few things:

1. It caps the liability for an incident at a single reactor. It goes up with inflation and I believe it's currently $500 million;

2. It establishes an industry-wide secondary self-insurance fund for broader incidents and caps liability. I believe the current theoretical value is $15-20 billion; and

3. In the event of a wider incident, the per-reactor liability cap is lower than (1). I believe it's $150 million.

So who pays if an incident exceeds these caps? The government does. These are either entirely or largely privately owned. Why exactly are we subsidizing private providers this way while enjoying none of the profits?

Now go and look at the cleanup costs of either Chernobyl or Fukushima. The latter is going to take decades, possibly a century, and the costs are in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Chernobyl is probably higher.

Yet these get hand-waved away by nuclear advocates despite there being 2 major events when fewer than 700 nuclear plants have been built (and I believe that includes non-power plants).

Now do the clean up costs of fossil fuel power generation

Crude oil has been leaking in to the oceans on and off for millennia.

You know what happens to it?

It breaks down.

Interesting take to trivialize oil spills.

Take coal, then. The radiation from coal power alone (excluding accidents) kills more people every single year than nuclear power has killed in its entire existence (even including accidents).

But you focus on one single thing: Oil spills. The grandparent comment talks of fossile fuels. What about co2?

Co2 has been leaking out into the atmosphere for many years. You know what happens to it? It stays around basically forever, kills enormously (directly and indirectly), and in fact causes a spiralling effect.

Ah yes, The Carbon Dioxide Boogyman.

It’s literally in our blood, but couldn’t possibly serve any purpose in the atmosphere.

Yes, we must destroy ourselves in this singular focus of forcing green renewables on everyone at any cost.

Remember when governments weren’t to be trusted, and we were taught to question things? No? Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

Climate Change isn’t an existential threat.

Green energy isn’t.

Renewables are not.

Not always- sometimes it - forms a street:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asphalt_volcano

Which we are replacing with renewables? Trying to shove fossil fuels into the picture seems like a false comparison?

In my opinion the best argument for nuclear power is not money, but environmental.

The radiation from coal power alone (excluding accidents) kills more people every single year than nuclear power has killed in its entire existence (even including accidents).

But also: What is the cost of non-nuclear's raising of co2 levels and climate change?

The environmental argument would be to reduce coal as quickly as possible.

Solar and wind each deployed more than double the coal displacing generation in china than nuclear over the last 15 years. And that includes their early years when they were just getting started. It's triple over the last 10 years or about 6x (wind) or 8x (solar) more in the last 5 years.

> The environmental argument

Which is an economic argument, too. It's merely not been priced in yet.

Yup. I guess we still disagree if nuclear is needed long term for Dunkelflaute, and for countries with darker winters.

It's one thing to use storage for overnight. Another if it's for a couple of weeks. And yet another for 6 months.

And take Sweden: Lots of hydro power yes, but where it can feasibly & economically be built, it already has. You can't expand it. And that's not even mentioning that all you need is a drought in winter, and you can no longer rely on it. Currently Sweden is backed by coal plants in Germany. But we need to plan for it being Dunkelflaute in Germany and Italy, at least enough to not have surplus for the nordics.

As for "it's always sunny somewhere", sure, but you need to get it there, somehow. Transmission is why electricity prices in Sweden can be "more than infinity percent" more expensive in south of Sweden compared to north. (electricity prices in the north has gone as far as negative), and is why data centers are built near power plants, or at least it's part of DC location planning.

If transmission costs were negligible then we wouldn't need to take power into account for DC placement. I have some rants about this related to how some DCs are away from population centers to save money on power, noticeably sacrificing latency to the actual end users.

The zonal pricing differences in Sweden are mostly a mathematical mirage. The cheap zones 1 and 2 are combined together only a third of the demand of zone 3.

If you waved a magic wand and combined them with infinite transmission for free the price in the expensive area with all the people and energy demand would barely move. (It would disproportionately rise in the cheap zones).

So any sane approach wouldn't spend money shifting the small amount of surplus power from the cheap region but spend the same money on say offshore wind feeding into the expensive zone. This is basically the pitch for zonal pricing, it tells you where demand and supply are needed. Building lots of transmission until the price is the same everywhere defeats the purpose. Building lots of offshore wind was the actual plan but most of those got rejected on bogus national security grounds.

The rejected wind farms would have doubled the entire country's generation.

As long as the overall strategy has a plan for dunkelflaute which isn't just "oh then we'll just import (German coal power)", then sure.

> bogus national security grounds.

Nobody would sabotage energy infrastructure in or near international waters, you mean?

For China, coal power generation is the bedrock of electric production. They have plenty of coal reserves and are building a plenty of new coal power plants.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/katharinabuchholz/2026/02/27/ch...

The share of primary energy in China in 2025 was: coal 56% , oil 20.8%, gas 9.8%, nuclear 3.2%, hydro 3%, solar 2.6%, wind 2.5%

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-primary-energy-b...

But there is one positive change. 2025 was the first year in history of China when solar energy production increased more then increase in coal, gas or oil energy production.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-change-primary-ene...

> https://www.versicherungsforen.net/schaden-leistung/berechnu...

From google translate """ Depending on the probability of such an event occurring, the annual premium varies between €0.01 and €305.83, based on a mean total insured sum of approximately €6,090 billion. If the entire insured sum were to be provided over a period of 100 years, the annual insurance premium per nuclear power plant would amount to €19.5 billion. """

No mention where the 6.09T EUR (presumably 2011) cost comes from. Given the stated insurance premium of 19.5B EUR power station per year I would naively expect such a cataclysm to happen perhaps once every 300 years. The global reactor fleet has been running for at least 19,000 years (https://www.ans.org/cdn/policy/statements/docs/ps51.pdf); the two IAEA INES level 7 accidents relating to nuclear power stations were Chernobyl and Fukushima, and cost nothing like 6T EUR. Therefore the numbers in the insurance study do not align with what is observed.

And I would question the "accidental" nature of Chernobyl, given than the power plant has voluntarily been pushed out of its boundaries.

...and yes I know, then design flaws stroke. But the initial spark was not accidental at all.

We also don't factor in a carbon tax for the fossil-fuel power plants.

Yet their CO2 will remain for 10'000 years on the atmosphere, affecting even remote populations.

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