The very same meticulous regulatory oversight that make plants safe makes them impossible to get through permitting cost-effectively. The result of the "soft ban" are a number of extremely safe plants that it's not economical to make more of. You could hypothetically enforce a similar "soft ban" for leaded gasoline or asbestos - by requiring elaborate filtration, containment and disposal procedures, plus monitoring and redundant process oversight. They'd never show up on consumer vehicles or in homes, but they may show up in a handful of specialty applications, complete with extraordinary amounts of paperwork and large government departments. Some people might start talking about "clean fiber," or "safe leaded."
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.
In the US we get 20% of our power from nuclear, we have for 40 years, and most of those plants were built before we invented safety. How much risk for 100%? <5x. Probably much less, because we learn.
Some levels of safety must be designed in, and those designs have the attractive property that they do not necessarily rely on continued organizational competence. Not that that's a bad thing. The more layers of defense the merrier, of course.
Some designs are resistant to one failure, reactor runaways; but the larger and more expensive problem is keeping radioactivated coolant and parts out of our waterways and waste/recycling streams.
If only the overall amount of waste were small, the transport secure, and we had geological formations in which to bury the stuff that by their very dissolvable-but-not-dissolved existence proved that water left only by evaporation!
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.
I come to the conclusion that the results will most likely be "civilisation supressing" worst case. It won't be fun but we won't end up in caves or extinct.
The tricky bit about nuclear construction today isn’t really _safety_ so much as public acceptance; you’ll get tied up for decades in disputes which are nothing in particular to do with the safety regulation, and everything to do with public opposition.
> ...it'd have to involve a serious overhaul of the very concepts of corporations and liability in America
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.
That sounds like a great idea, if you can get it implemented. Policymakers seem to be going in the opposite direction with things like tort reform (dollar value limitations on damages), and insurers who make exceptions for "acts of God," like major natural disasters. Hundred-billion-dollar insurance policies on the habitability of areas several counties in expanse, along with courts willing to resettle entire cities as part of treble damages is far from the system we have! These astounding things would be necessary to fully replace regulation with liability, even for the often-seen-as-less-apocalyptic chemical industry, which is nonetheless capable of killing thousands in extremis, and that would have to be insured.
They would solve the problem by making nuclear power too expensive for anyone to consider. Insurance companies don't like risks they can't quantify reliably. They either won't underwrite such risks at all, or they charge unreasonable premiums.
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.
> The risks of nuclear power are still largely unknown, as there have been only two major disasters over a few decades.
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.
You are talking about risks in a narrow technical sense. Insurance companies are more interested in the consequences of the disaster.
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.
That is a mistaken view; he's actually talking about liability. The risk of nuclear is smaller than the damage of the status quo, but it is so unexpected that we hold people liable when it materialises.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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."
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.
Three Mile island was very close to being a major disaster, and upon further review had more radiation escape than was initially disclosed.
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...
> Three Mile island was very close to being a major disaster
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.
Yep, it's a perception issue that isn't helped by the fact that to normies, "nuclear" means "bomb", and the oil and gas industries have massively more lobbying dollars to get politicians to push their solutions above all others.
> Insurance companies don't like risks they can't quantify reliably. They either won't underwrite such risks at all, or they charge unreasonable premiums.
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).
Let's check again in 50 years, after the safety systems have had time to deteriorate, and we've had Chinese Glasnost for a look into the archives from 2056. (The Soviet Union would have kept Chernobyl a secret if Sweden hadn't detected the radiation. If the accident had been limited to the boundaries of Ukraine, it might never have been revealed as long as the regime lasted.)
Virtually all plants being built in China today are third-gen evolutions of proven second-gen PWRs, themselves very safe.
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).
Chernobyl was not a result of safety systems deteriorating over a long period of operation. We have plenty of reactors in the world that have operated for decades and their safety systems still work just fine.
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.
Fun fact, there were four reactors at Chernobyl. Only one - Unit 4 - was destroyed in the flagship incident. The other three were retrofitted after the incident and continued to produce power (relatively) safely for many years. Unit 2 was shut down in 1991 after a turbine fire. Unit 1 was decommissioned in 1996. Unit 3 was decommission in 2000 after the international community forced their hand in exchange for funding the New Safe Containment sarcophagus over Unit 4.
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.
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.
All regulated industries receive liability breaks as "compensation" for being regulated. For example, many classes of product approved by the FDA are considered immune from liabilities related to dangers discovered in application[0], in particular, medical devices[1]. I agree that it is likely to distort the markets and incentivize regulatory capture.
Do you have more examples for this "all"? There are a lot of regulated industries out there, and I haven't heard of liability exemptions for them. E.g., food is highly regulated, but there are plenty of lawsuits over that. Ditto cars. Or banks. Or airplanes.
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."
> In the US, the federal government provides a massive subsidy in the form of free insurance
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.
No, insurance doesn't work like that. The cost of the Fukushima disaster is something like $200 billion. An insurer isn't going to say, "Well gosh, no US plant has ever had a problem, so we're happy to write a $250 billion policy for the same price as a $15 billion policy." ($15 billion being the liability cap beyond which taxpayers are on the hook.)
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.
> The cost of the Fukushima disaster is something like $200 billion.
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?
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.