The other market distortion that enabled nuclear to be built was the regulated monopolies of electric utilities. These utilities earn based on their capital investment, so the larger the capital investment they can get the regulators to swallow, the better. And this is best done by systems with large up front costs, costs that can be underestimated then escalated after the initial fixed investment.

What really killed the first wave of nuclear in the US was not TMI or over-regulation, but the passage of PURPA that began to open the markets to competition from non-utility suppliers.

Prior to 2000, the space industry was thought to be extremely complex and expensive and viable only by state sponsored efforts, i.e. NASA, ESA, and so on.

And then SpaceX, Blue Origin, and others have come along and shown that an industry that expensive can be profitable, cheap, and safe.

It's not a perfect analogy by a long shot, but it's similar in terms of (historical) investment.

There's no reason to believe that nuclear should be any different. The engineering and physics is well understood.

I'd say that you've omitted the word "current", i.e. "current Nuclear plants have always been uninsurable", and "current Nuclear only ever exists and will only ever continue to existing because of subsidies."

I'll re-iterate my previous comment, if Governments would step back from over regulation, and the desire for reactors to produce weapons grade uranium and plutonium as a by-product, then new designs could be achieved quickly, cheaply, and safely. Molten-salt is being actively researched: https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/09/04/166330/meltdown-...

SpaceX and Blue Origin exist because of two billionaires brought up on dreams of space travel. Without their willingness to sustain potentially very heavy losses those companies would not exist.

It's not like there are a variety of startups nipping at their heels. They want to make a profit but they're not doing it because they're convinced they will.

As for the word "current"... well, if the nuclear industry thinks it's so safe and thinks it can prove it to the insurance industry why don't they prove it and forgo their public insurance subsidy? They fought for this subsidy in the first place, they can give it up just as easily.

Why not let the free market decide if they're safe rather than providing taxpayers as a backstop?

> Why not let the free market decide if they're safe rather than providing taxpayers as a backstop?

The free market is pretty evidence based, so it would decide they are safe. I doubt the public insurance subsidy works the way you are representing it. They'd not insure against the risk of a catastrophic meltdown in a free market, the risk is too low. The "insurance" is probably more of a government tax on the assumption that there is latent risk. I'm not going to say that is unreasonable, but it doesn't have anything to do with how safe the industry thinks it is.

Consider Fukushima, the result of one of the biggest earthquakes in recorded history (Wikipedia says 4th largest [0]). Free markets don't bother to insure against that sort low-risk event. It would be like insuring San Francisco against the fact that it is on an active fault line - the market doesn't bother to insure against a risk that rare.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_earthquakes#Largest_e...

> The free market is pretty evidence based

The free market is entirely based on investor hype. We have economic downturns ever 7-ish years, like clockwork, because some bubble burst again. It's a fallacy to treat investors like rational actors.

> There's no reason to believe that nuclear should be any different. The engineering and physics is well understood.

Well, for one, a rocket launch going wrong can certainly kill people, but it won't make an entire region uninhabitable.

Chernobyl is presumably what you're talking about. It was a high pressure steam explosion due a sudden introduction of energy into the system, which of course would cause an explosion and contaminate a wide area [0].

> The engineering and physics is well understood.

as are the safety issues which is why there what research there is for a modern nuclear reactor design would not repeat those mistakes (e.g. molten-salt).

Whether the region around Chernobyl is uninhabitable is debatable, given that animals have returned to it in abundance.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK

One major thing about nuclear is that we do not even truly understand the effects of wide-ranging low doses of nuclear radiation.

I am repeating here from an earlier post:

There are many things we do not understand about radiation. The traditional models on radiation dosis and health effects are probably too simple. There is a strain of research on epigenetic effects of ionizing radiation:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=epig...

Simply put, we often see the DNA as a kind of program which is executing on our body. But it is actually a program which, activates, inactivates, modifies and rewrites itself, so that the program code can reflect environmental conditions - especially during the growth of a fetus.

Radiation effects are very difficult to capture by statistics. A part of the reason is that cancer is not a rare illness, and any kind of cancer which might be induced by additional low doses of radiation will be covered by a lot of noise. But if these low doses of radiation affect a large number of individuals, radiation could still cause a lot of damage. What makes it even more difficult is that radiation, as it affects genetic control loops in the cell, has no distinct picture of its effects. It could be cancer, but it could also be effects on the central nervous system. Or circulatory diseases, which have been reported from Chernobyl as well. And what makes it more difficult of course is that it is not an area where one can make controlled experiments, so it is mostly science by observation. This is tricky because there are so many confounding factors. Even with something entirely plausible like, say, "smoking causes cancer", or "neonicotinoids probably affect bees and insects", it is hard to come to a conclusion.

There are also more concrete causes for concern. In Germany, following some irregularities at the Kruemmel nuclear plant, in the Wesermarsch area near Hamburg, it was found there was a cluster of leukemia cases in children - many times more than what was to be expected from the normal statistical case numbers. In the follow-up, the incidence of leukemia near all nuclear power stations was determined, and compared to other factors. A significantly higher incidence of leukemia was found, with no good explanation so far.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9728737/

http://www.crause.de/elbmarschleukaemie.html

https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Leuk%C3%A4mieclus...

Some researchers also have found there is a correlation between the proportion of sexes of humans at birth, and radiation:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03783...

I need to point out that this is not established science - but it poses very important questions.

The traditional theory on effects of ionizing radiation can so far still not explain this. A possible hypothesis is that radiation disturbs the expression of the delicate self-modifying genetic program, which has disproportionately large effects during early development.

Another interesting observation is that in Chernobyl, insects seem more affected by radiation than vertebrates. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=epig... https://www.thoughtco.com/chernobyl-animal-mutations-4155348

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2679916/

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/chernobyls-bugs-...