How many nuclear power plants are their in the world? How many have had failures from "earthquake shock, fire following earthquake and tsunami"? How many failures have occurred for other reasons? From that standpoint it is hard to argue that the premiums would have been significantly different without that clause. I'd also point out that such a clause is hardly unusual in the insurance business. You'll see the like on all kinds of property and liability policies.
To prove your assertions, you'd need to come up with a nuclear reactor which was constructed in an unregulated environment. ;-)
Look, I'm not making claims one way or another. I'm simply suggesting that your claim doesn't seem very credible once one has applied some very simple logic. I could be missing something, but I think you ought to have some evidence to back up such an extraordinary claim. As someone else pointed out, your typical coal operation ought to have a higher incident rate and cost, which means it ought to be even more expensive...
Realistically, you can calculate the costs without coming up with your silly example. It is sufficient to simply add up the costs needed to cover the disaster, and then look at the premiums paid for covering similar sized disasters with similar rates of occurrence, making your best effort to extrapolate over any gaps.
Alternatively, speak with an actuarial who works in the business and they can extrapolate what the premiums would be. In a truly unregulated market, I'd imagine the incident rate would be higher and the recovery costs a bit lower, so it might be hard to get a real cost, but go for the costs in the existing regulated market. I have a hard time imagining they'd be prohibitive, but I'd be intrigued if you proved otherwise.
How many nuclear power plants are their in the world?
436 plus 63 in construction (as of 2010).
It is sufficient to simply add up the costs needed to cover the disaster
The total cost for the Chernobyl incident was estimated at $235 billion[1] in 2006 and the figure only keeps growing.
Since 2007 they're building a new sarcophagus (because the old one is falling apart). The costs were estimated at another $1.4 billion for that alone. But they're late already, and well, you know how it goes.
In contrast Hurricane Katrina was a bargain at $150 billion dollars [2].
The Fukushima incident is estimated to cost $257 billion dollars [3] and that's probably a little optimistic.
and then look at the premiums paid for covering similar sized disasters with similar rates of occurrence
See, here is your problem. At these scales there is no coverage and no reference; these are disasters of national scale. For Katrina the insurance industry paid $41 billion dollars [2], guess who carried the rest.
And the real question is: What happens when some confused individuals somehow manage to smuggle nail-clippers onto passenger planes and then fly them into multiple reactors, in densely populated areas, at the same time?
> And the real question is: What happens when some confused individuals somehow manage to smuggle nail-clippers onto passenger planes and then fly them into multiple reactors, in densely populated areas, at the same time?
It's worth noting that the US military has at times very deliberately attacked nuclear facilities with armaments much more deadly than nail-clippers or a passenger plane that you might obtain from them. The damages are not the stuff of legend.
The US government has done the test, granted an F4 isn't a passenger jet but it probably has similar kinetic energy to a smaller passenger plane as it was going rather fast.
probably has similar kinetic energy to a smaller passenger plane
The most widely used passenger plane is the Boeing 737.
F4 Phantom empty weight: 29,500 lbs
Boeing 737 empty weight: 62,000 lbs
The average operating weight difference is probably quite a bit larger. You know, fuel, baggage, passengers.
You may want to review those videos from 9/11 to see what a passenger plane does to a building. You may also want to listen to the narrative of your video: The wall in your video is a specially hardened wall. Your reactors are not equipped with such walls because that would be cost prohibitive. And even these hardened walls are unlikely to withstand a passenger plane (ever wondered why the US government selected such a small plane for your video?).
I listened. Kinetic energy is the mass times the square of the velocity. F4's go way faster than 737's. Thus kinetic energy is comprable between the two.
"The containment building itself is typically an airtight steel structure enclosing the reactor normally sealed off from the outside atmosphere. The steel is either free-standing or attached to the concrete missile shield. In the United States, the design and thickness of the containment and the missile shield are governed by federal regulations (10 CFR 50.55a), and must be strong enough to withstand the impact of a fully loaded passenger airliner without rupture.[3][not in citation given]"
It's also not my nuclear reactor. My power comes from hydroelectric thank you very much.
Also I'll ask you a very simple question: Why did the US Government not use a passenger plane for that video-demonstration, which would undoubtedly be a much more realistic scenario?
737's don't go that fast at sea level. Air is too dense. An f4 could probably go 2-3x as fast as a 737 at any altitude. I'm too lazy to look up the specific values.
As to why they used an f4? Probably a heck of a lot cheaper than a 737 at the time.
Sometimes the government isn't out to screw you you know...
As to why they used an f4? Probably a heck of a lot cheaper than a 737 at the time.
It would seem like there are plenty of scrapped 737s available[1] to carry out such a test. I'm too lazy to look up prices on these things, but I'd be very surprised if those were significantly more expensive than a scrapped Phantom.
Also we're not only talking about the main reactor housing. Much more radioactive material resides in spent fuel pools which might not be as well protected as the reactor, see also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_fuel_pool#Risks
Actually, most of the damage came from the burning of the fuel. It's worth noting that most nuclear plants have very different construction and design that make them far more resilient in the face of such a disaster... like significant portions being designed to operate continuously at high temperatures...
It's worth noting that most nuclear plants have very different construction and design that make them far more resilient in the face of such a disaster
We've seen how these designs fare in the face of an earthquake and flood.
We're both arguing on the grounds of mere guessing here, but my guess would be that a plane crash might very well cause similar disruptions.
Also if I was a terrorist plotting such an event, I might just fly two planes into the same reactor - because, why not?
The question is not about how such an event is executed but how likely it is. I hope we can agree that a dedicated team of individuals will find a way to cause a catastrophic event in these facilities.
And that's precisely the problem; Nuclear plants require something that we can't provide: Perfection.
We may be able to keep the nominal failure rate at the level that we've seen (Chernobyl, Fukushima). But all economic calculations that these plants have going for them are immediately invalidated when you start considering a single successful deliberate attack.
A dedicated group of individuals capable of harnessing a number of planes in the air simultaneously and get them on a trajectory to a nuclear plant, with an impact exceeding a military bombing attack...
...can probably just build a bomb on their own just fine.
Nuclear power plants don't require perfection. There are minute possibilities of terrible disasters with almost any facility. Nuclear plants do have some particularly disconcerting problems that seem fairly obvious and must be mitigated against, but I think we can allow for the fact that with or without a nuclear plant, bad shit can happen, and actually without said plant, bad shit will happen.
Bhopal didn't have a nuclear power plant, just a measly ol' pesticide plant.
...can probably just build a bomb on their own just fine.
Building a bomb with effects comparable to a reactor meltdown requires significant resources. Running a few planes into a building requires - plane tickets.
You do remember that 9/11 thing, do you?
There are minute possibilities of terrible disasters with almost any facility
You pull every last ridiculous straw, don't you?
Yes, other bad things happen, too. If you think long and hard then you might grasp the difference in magnitude.
Hint: Chernobyl is estimated to have caused 250.000 deaths. 1700 square miles of land have been rendered permanently inhabitable. The numbers for Fukushima are still outstanding.
Thank you. The final figures for Chernobyl and Fukushima will no doubt be higher. Not to mention the cost of people dying of cancer. Nevertheless, let's just take these figures for now.
They work out at well over a billion per commissioned plant.
It is hardly a low risk, is it?
Estimates of Chernobyl's costs have been exacerbated by a number of factors, not the least of which was a number of ridiculous things that were done to cover up the mess.
The $150 billion Katrina estimate is ignoring a number of factors including things like... loss of life, which you know, tends to impact the costs of things.
Just the Federal government has spent >$100 billion and nobody in the area even tries to pretend that they've restored it to its previous state or undone the economic harm. Insurance companies, as you said, have paid $41 billion, so there you're at $141 billion and you've barely scratched the surface as compared to the things factored in to that $235 and $257 billion figures.
But let's cast all that aside. Let's assume the cost is 2-3x Katrina. The incident rate is obviously not that high (there's a reason basically all nuclear plant failures trace back to a design from the 60's), but I'm sure you can plug that in.
Now, I haven't done the math for how many aggregate plant-years of operation we've had, but let's say your average plant has been in operation for 10 years (which is definitely low-balling it in the US, but the mere fact we run these old nuclear power plants is exactly why they are so much more likely to have problems). That's 4360 plant-years. The Wikipedia page has 20+ incidents listed, but that includes a lot of cases that are tiny compared to the disasters you are thinking in terms of (and of course, ironically, anyone who is insuring these things will tell you that those smaller incidents are the primary drivers of the costs in an insurance policy). I count 5 cases throughout history with costs >$1 billion. That works out to a very exaggerated rate of one incident every 972 plant-years.
So, with all those "tie your hand behind your back" factors, a premium of $50 million/year would cover costs very well and leave the insurer rolling profit margins that'll probably create a congressional investigation. That's a lot of money, but compared to the economic output of a power plant, isn't prohibitive.
Realistically though, newer reactor designs, particularly post-3 mile island, have a much lower incident rate than their predecessors and much better mechanisms for containing damage. If insurers were driving the design of plants, it'd probably be even lower (or costs would drop). Most insurers would probably also adjust their premiums based on the age of plants, which at some point would make it more cost effective to build a new one than to keep operating an old one. They'd also reduce costs by establishing rules that would limit their liability in circumstances where the failure was due to some other party not managing their responsibilities.
I'm curious what the real numbers are, but you can see that even being grossly unfair, insurance costs for disasters are not going to make nuclear plants economically non-viable.
You're ignoring the elephant in the room that I mentioned in my last paragraph: We have no idea what the worst-case looks like. We only know it will be beyond imagination.
Please do your math again, and now factor in 3 simultaneous meltdowns in USA reactors, due to plane hits.
Yes, this is exceedingly unlikely. I'd say about as unlikely as passenger planes deliberately crashing into the WTC.
It looks like the Fukushima meltdowns, which with better reactors design would have been manageable.
If you want to get worked up about risks, do the math on meteor and comet impacts. There is a reason that American defense planners are blasé about nuclear reactors and worked up about extraterrestrial impactors. It's only a matter of time before we lose a city to a meteor. That's lose, not temporarily evacuate or have an unfortunate increase in cancer rates.
It looks like the Fukushima meltdowns, which with better reactors design would have been manageable.
Perhaps. An energy shield (like in starwars!) would also make them safe. But we don't have these things. Most reactors are over 20 years old[1] and not going to be replaced with better designs any time soon.
If you want to get worked up about risks, do the math on meteor and comet impacts
We can't do anything about meteors and comets.
But we can get rid of nuclear plants.
Newer designs are not used because the environmentalists would rather have political power than electrical power. We have the know-how to design standardized reactors and build them by the hundreds, but not the will.
The meteor problem is even easier to solve. We need to build observation telescopes, lots of them. We then use off-the-shelf rockets to paycheck off-the-shelf nuclear bomb interceptors mounted on almost-off-the-shelf delivery platforms.
Yes, why use simple cheap solar panels that can easily be replaced if we can over engineer everything to the nth degree?
Thank you for illuminating the core difficulty of too much centralisation: mounting problems and mounting costs.
Looking at Fukushima, it is not the terrorists and the meteors that frighten me the most. It is the simple combination of the everyday events like earthquakes, with corruption, inefficiency, cost-cutting and the culture of secrecy that fosters and supports it all. These are the real but invisible dangers that you cannot shoot down from your robotic space platforms.
Covering up the Chernobyl mess? What makes you think covering up Fukushima has cost a lot? I mean, yeah the nuclear industry has a lot of free PR drones in IT for some reason, but still, it's gotta be pretty costly to run the kind of shit they did.
To prove your assertions, you'd need to come up with a nuclear reactor which was constructed in an unregulated environment. ;-)
Look, I'm not making claims one way or another. I'm simply suggesting that your claim doesn't seem very credible once one has applied some very simple logic. I could be missing something, but I think you ought to have some evidence to back up such an extraordinary claim. As someone else pointed out, your typical coal operation ought to have a higher incident rate and cost, which means it ought to be even more expensive...
Realistically, you can calculate the costs without coming up with your silly example. It is sufficient to simply add up the costs needed to cover the disaster, and then look at the premiums paid for covering similar sized disasters with similar rates of occurrence, making your best effort to extrapolate over any gaps.
Alternatively, speak with an actuarial who works in the business and they can extrapolate what the premiums would be. In a truly unregulated market, I'd imagine the incident rate would be higher and the recovery costs a bit lower, so it might be hard to get a real cost, but go for the costs in the existing regulated market. I have a hard time imagining they'd be prohibitive, but I'd be intrigued if you proved otherwise.