[triceratops]

Please see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28774444

Tl;dr nuclear is safe. But if it goes wrong, the cleanup costs can wipe out decades of profits.

That's why it's so expensive, and why private insurers refuse to touch it. Insuring it is the proverbial picking up pennies in front of a steamroller.

Downvoters: feel free to tell me why I'm wrong. I'd love to learn more. I have no axe to grind against nuclear.

[Jensson]

If you average those clean-up costs for every nuclear plant in the world and how long they have been running then it isn't expensive at all.

[triceratops]

Are you sure? I couldn't find figures on global nuclear industry profits. Best I could do was revenue (about $2tn in 2021)[1].

If we assume nuclear has a gross profit margin of 10% like other utilities[2] then Fukushima's cleanup and compensation costs amounted to 1 year of all nuclear industry gross profits in 2021 (adjusting for the size of the industry in 2011, the various points in time when those costs were incurred, and inflation is too complex to go into here).

That's clearly a fuckton of money. Insuring against it is expensive. Blaming "regulations and tree-hugging environmentalists" for nuclear energy being expensive seems dishonest to me.

1. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210721005453/en/Nuc...

2. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/011915/what-average...

[Jensson]

Yeah, so having such an accident to clean up every 30 years would make nuclear about 1% more expensive than now if you take it into account. So it is hardly a big factor in the cost of nuclear.

[triceratops]

That math works out only if all the nuclear power plants in the world pay into a single risk pool. Which they don't.

Do you know how much companies actually pay for private insurance in the US? I haven't been able to find details. But I did learn that private insurance caps out at $450m and the industry as a whole agrees to cover costs above that (out of their own policies) up to $12b or so. Above that, it's up to Congress to come up with the money.[1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

[chucksta]

It would be interesting to compare the cost of all nuclear cleanup, vs the cleanup costs of all the oil spills

[triceratops]

That's fair. But we're not talking about nuclear vs fossil fuels. Nuclear is obviously better than anything carbon.

The debate is nuclear vs solar, wind, and hydro and how the case for nuclear is framed as "ack-chually, nuclear is better than renewables and would cost less if only those damned tree-hugging libs would get over their irrational fears"

[chucksta]

True. I guess I still see a constant power source as a requirement, so the comparison to green energy doesn't even matter at this point, but it's the goal.

My comment was more curiosity than disagreement