> That’s spreading the cost of one plant, once incident. There are a lot more plants and Japan isn’t the most geologically stable place.

I think it would be worth comparing to the costs of incidents with other energy forms. Deepwater Horizon comes to mind with a cost 2 or 3 times that number (not counting fines). To say nothing of all the spills/incidents we don't hear about with tankers spilling/leaking on the open waters, just far enough away nobody notices.

Yes, but the cost is spread out over all the nuclear plants in operation. Nuclear energy already provides 10% of the world's nuclear power. We currently average one significant nuclear catastrophe every 20 years. $15 billion every 2 years is a miniscule cost relative to the amount of power nuclear energy provides.

And that's assuming newer plants don't have any improved safety over Fukushima. We already feature secondary containment, which would have prevent Chernobyl from being nearly as bad as it was, the Soviets just didn't build secondary containment. The reality is that we only have one instance of a meltdown breaching secondary containment in over 70 years of nuclear power operation.

And lastly, all this needs to be viewed relative to the ecological impact of covering several percent of the Earth's land surface in solar panels, and the environmental damage from fossil fuels that will be necessary until effective energy storage is developed.