Remember that he's talking about a new generation of reactor designs. Also remember that a key driver of the high cost of nuclear energy is lawsuits based on irrational overestimates of the risk of nuclear energy compared to other energy sources. Coal has killed orders of magnitude more people than nuclear, yet nobody ever brings a NIMBY lawsuit to prevent a coal plant from being built.
> Wouldn't a profit oriented insurance company cover these risks, of these were really as low and controllable as people say here?
The technical risks are not the risks the insurance companies are worried about.
What's killing nuclear isn't environmentalists, it's that this stuff is hard, really hard, and it's getting harder over time as more failure scenarios are known.
Three Mile Island - how many fatalities? Fukushima - who died? Chernobyl - there should be a Godwin's law about this.
Meanwhile, life expectancy is down, coal fired plants are quite literally poisoning our atmosphere, and oil explosions and accidents kill more people in a decade than nuclear power has over its existence (nuclear power, not nuclear weaponry. Though that's an interesting question - how many people were killed in fire bombings or by fuel-air weapons vs by nukes?)
Safety in general is not to be taken lightly. But we should assess the relative safety of different technologies fairly. We don't do that with nuclear; we hold it to standards far higher than the ones we enforce for other technologies, even though those other technologies have killed orders of magnitude more people. That is not rational.
> this stuff is hard, really hard, and it's getting harder over time as more failure scenarios are known.
This could be said of any technology. But again, we hold nuclear to far higher standards than we do other technologies that have failure scenarios which have already killed orders of magnitude more people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China#Reactor...
Do you have a source for this as the new EPR reactor in finland is aboud three times as expensive as planned?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...
I was actually talking about nuclear energy in US; I'm not familiar with the legal regimes in other countries to know how much of an impact lawsuits have been. France, at least, has been getting the majority of their electricity from nuclear reactors for several decades now, so clearly it is possible to have a saner legal environment.
> is aboud three times as expensive as planned
How experienced is this construction company at building nuclear reactors?
How big the eventual costs (the article speaks of "at least €4 billion ($5.3 billion), but more likely somewhere between €5 billion and €10 billion") will be is uncertain, and I can't back this up by any real evidence, but my guess is that those who profited from the waste disposal might not be the ones paying for the clean-up.
This all makes me think of the Futurama episode "A Big Piece of Garbage" [2]:
>The others quickly dismiss Leela's concerns that the new garbage ball will return and destroy a future generation. Professor Farnsworth replies that it will not be for hundreds of years, presumably by the year 4000, prompting Fry to say "That's the 20th Century spirit!"
[1]http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-weighs-o...
I will quote myself [1]:
>People always forget about indirect costs when talking about cheap nuclear energy (risk factors aside). Nobody has ever built a profitable nuclear power plant without substantial government subsidies (way higher than for all renewable energy sources). Operators need government help for security, fuel supply, waste handling and much more. There is no insurance company on earth which will cover a nuclear power plant without state guarantees (ask yourself: Wouldn't a profit oriented insurance company cover these risks, of these were really as low and controllable as people say here?).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10143081