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Well, if that's so rare and can essentially be ignored, I'm sure you'll easily find insurance for nuclear plants that will cover the cost of a potential disaster. I mean, after all, it evens out over all the nuke plants, right? The market handles it, right?
There's a ton of stuff going on all the time which no amunt of insurance will cover. Modern nuclear generators just can't blow up like Chernobyl. Fukushima is a bit different, but maybe we shouldn't build reactors in places where they can be hit by a tsunami in the first place. And even there the environmental impact was somewhat limited.
And that doesn't change the fact that shutting down nuclear plants and replacing their energy output with coal caused more radiation in ash and other particles which are spread out of the chimney to the environment as a part of normal operation.
And what exactly would that be? Essentially everything has insurance.
Yeah. And what's stopping other stuff to be "a bit different"?
Japan got damn lucky the wind blew everything seawards. If the fallout had hit Tokyo, this would have been a very different story.
And who did that? Nobody. There were no new coal plants to replace anything. That statement is straight up misleading. The old plants were kept running, yes, and they kept emitting, yes. And that's always the thing that's being brought up, "they could have taken the coal plants offline sooner had they just kept the nuke plants running a little longer". But that's an entirely different thing than "they replaced nuclear with coal". Nobody did that. Had they not tanked the German market for renewables, the coal plants would have been taken offline earlier, too, but for some reason that's never the sob story. Instead, people keep bringing up nuke plants time and time again, which is just weird. Yeah, coal and nuclear both destroy the planet. Let's not see which one's marginally worse but instead maybe just push something that's actually good for the planet?
Here's a list of one type of that kind of disasters where, despite of insurance, various kinds of environmental damage has been left behind which may or may not completely heal, or at least it takes a long, long time.
Here's a pretty public different kind of disaster which I guarantee was not 100% covered by insurance either. Here's another. I'm not building a comprehensive list, there's just too many and their impacts vary wildly.
Then there's the waste management in poorer countries which also cause immeasurable damage to the environment all the time by using a nearby river as a sewage for everything. Here's one example which made into the headlines back then. And here's a list of similar examples.
Go read yourself:
And remember that the pollution which kills people just because breathing smoke and ash is bad, it's also radioactive.
That would be really nice. We just don't have the alternatives ready to go for that just yet. Here in Finland, on a good day, renewables produce more than nuclear, but those are exceptions. Feel free to look up the data in finngrid service. There's currently over 7000MW worth of turbines around but it's pretty common to have even less than 200MW of wind power in the grid and that unreliability needs to be stabilized with something else.
I have no idea how you get the idea that oil spills aren't covered by insurance. In fact, denying insurance is the easiest way to keep vessels out of your waters because they just won't go where they aren't covered. If something isn't cleaned up properly it's certainly not because of the lack of insurance.
Your next example was the Beirut explosion. First, I'm pretty sure there was somebody there who was liable. The issue is, though, that if that event wasn't covered by insurance (which I guess it wasn't, just because it was a shitty country where you maybe didn't have to have insurance) I'm pretty sure it serves as a good example that that was an idea that was dumb as fuck as this single event essentially tanked the country's economy for years or decades. I'm not sure what exactly your point is in this case except showing that there are some underdeveloped countries where you don't have to make sure your shit gets cleaned up after you and if it really hits the fan you take down the whole shithole with you. I'm not sure if that's how you want industries to operate where you live and I'm also not sure of that's your idea how nuclear plants should be operated. But, and that's my point, that's how they fucking are. Every single one of them.
The derailed train I don't get at all. There's a whole chapter on that page that deals with how they spent hundreds of millions on the cleanup and settlements. I'm sure a lot of it is covered by insurance companies. What makes you assume something else?
Your last counter example is sewage being fed into rivers covertly and possibly illegally. Like... Yeah, so? If you're willing to break the law I guess you don't care about insurance either. Still not how companies should be run.
Now that really got me curious. Seriously. It's the first time I ever heard about that, so thanks for the input. However, I couldn't really confirm it. First of all, just a look at the graphs of how energy sources developed...
It's just not there! Even more curiously, Wikipedia writes it differently on another page:
So, that's already much less drastic on its wording and more in line with the data above and my prior understanding of the situation. Still, that makes it weird... So I looked at the source your Wikipedia page cites.
Emphasis mine. But fucking hell...
Did you take a look at that paper? I mean apart from the fact that they put all their figures into the appendix, which makes it extremely annoying to read... Instead of looking at the data how power was actually produced, they just say their data doesn't have that info but they just came up with an algorithm that pulls the information out of its random for-ass and says it was probably coal. Subsequently, they use their made-up data as if those hallucinated junk tables were given facts:
Just look at the graphs that trace the actual production further up in this post... One third more hard coal? It's just not there! So, no, that source doesn't hold up and I really wonder who'd think that such a source should be used in the Wikipedia.
I disagree. Look at the gross electricity production graph. Just install more capacity than required and be done with it. As renewables produce electricity that's cheap as fuck, you can just install three times the capacity you need. Subsidise home and large scale batteries to even out energy usage and install large scale batteries and gas plants to hop in if required. Use the excess energy from your overcapacity to produce hydrogen. Push people and industries into hourly updated tariffs so they have a reason to not use electricity if it's scarce (and thus expensive). There are lot of methods. In Germany, an industry-heavy country, renewables are already delivering more than 60 percent of the electricity, up from essentially nothing thirty years ago, and I haven't heard a good argument why this couldn't be increased further. We have the alternatives and they are right here, right now, and they work.