[mohawk]

It would be good if these risks were objectively valued, for example by insuring the plant against meltdown costs.

Total economic loss estimates for the Fukushima meltdown are 250-500 bn USD[1]. And if the wind had been slightly different those numbers would be a lot higher, as Tokyo real estate would be affected.

And that insurance should also cover human error, terrorism, natural disasters. Won't be cheap is my guess.

Which brings us to the biggest myth of all, that nuclear power is cheap when you don't externalise so many costs.

[1] http://www.psr.org/environment-and-health/environmental-heal...

[wrsh07]

Yeah, it'll make sense to do that when you start insuring other power plants for the environmental damage they cause.

We're not charging a carbon tax on coal plants. We're not charging drivers for the air pollution they cause in cities. If you believe the WHO when they say 7 million people die prematurely from air pollution, are you going to start making air-polluters pay for that? (http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/air-pollut...) Are you insuring dams against the floods they would cause if they break?

It'd be great to do those things, but it's unreasonable to unfairly punish nuclear when you're not willing to charge other power plant technology for their expected negative externalities.

If you're going to start enacting "reasonable taxes" on negative externalities, start by getting us off of dirty energy, not by preventing us from using reusable energy.

[mohawk]

It would be great if externalities were insured by everybody, yes. But externalities are real, why would you ignore them "out of fairness"? The sane thing to do is to consider them for all kinds of power generation, and then make the best choice. Nuclear just has huge unconsidered negative externalities, we haven't even yet talked about cost of storing and guarding waste for centuries.

Thankfully there are only a few more years until wind & solar will have solved this once and for all by being cheaper, externalities considered or not.

[wrsh07]

You can't reject one form of power [as worse than existing power] because of externalities if you aren't considering the negative externalities of the existing power. It's not out of fairness, it's out of minimizing future damage.

If you aren't accurately considering the environmental damage of oil/coal/gas, then you can't say they're superior to nuclear just because you are considering its negatives.

I agree -- I look forward to a future of clean renewables, but even still wind and solar are inconsistent. Our storage systems aren't good enough to "just use batteries."[1]

We need a dependable, renewable form of energy that can bridge the gap for 80 years until our storage is good enough.

[1] http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/#moving-storage

[Retra]

You can't really insure against environmental damage.

[mohawk]

What exactly do you mean? It's too expensive? Legally impossible? No insurer would insure this?

It's a thought experiment to show what replacing wishful thinking with a tiny amount of objectivity would look like. OP was talking about expectation value of damages etc. Insurers are companies that deal with these sorts of things professionally.

The economic damages of Fukushima and Chernobyl are real and gigantic. It would be foolish to ignore them.