[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...