There's a major flaw in the argument of this article.
They calculate what Germany has payed in the past decades, including the very early phase of solar+wind development.
You can of course compare any number of things, whether it makes sense or not.
But for the question how to proceed with future energy it's completely irrelevant what solar+wind costed in 2005. We only care what it costs now and in the future. "Solar was super expensive in 2005, so we shouldn't build cheap solar in 2019" is not a useful or logical argument.
The key thing about the german renewable subsidies (and a few other countries, but particularly for solar it was mostly germany) is that they brought wind+solar from being overly expensive exotic technologies to cheap mass technologies.
This sound very similar to David Hume theory of "problem of induction", as any assumption that the past predicts the future can be wrong.
Personally I think there is value in looking at past decision and seeing what the outcomes were. We can compare two nations like France and Germany and objectively say who has contributed more to global warming. We can also calculate how much they paid for it. The cost side is less relevant as I don't live in either country, but the global warming does impact me so I have some stake in the outcome.
Ban globally the act of burning fossil fuels in power plants. That fixes the outcome I want. The cost questions can be address politically within each country.
Or the untold gazillions in indirect subsidies from not requiring nuclear power plants to be insured for damages arising from catastrophic incidents...
The issue is that you won't find an insurance company willing to insure a risk that they can't calculate. There's too little data to find a price here.
In the end, the government always bears the cost, because any catastrophic event will likely bankrupt the operator involved.
I think it's fair to count these catastrophic costs as subsidies, but they're not "untold gazillions". Estimates for the Fukushima disaster go up to about a trillion[1]. At the other side, the costs for Germany's "Energiewende" will run up over half a trillion[2], with relatively little to show for it[3].
You might assume this is just some techno-weenie blogger that's getting too excited about one of his hobbies, but if you look at the official submissions from companies aiming to build nuclear in Australia you'll see that this worrying lack of interest in objective truth is endemic to the industry.
Everything else apart, trusting someone with Billions of dollars after they try to pass off obviously out of date info on their competitor in order to con you into supporting them seems unwise.
Even being able to come up with vaguely convincing false information would give you more confidence in their abilities to successfully deliver such a project.
> You might assume this is just some techno-weenie blogger that's getting too excited about one of his hobbies, but if you look at the official submissions from companies aiming to build nuclear in Australia you'll see that this worrying lack of interest in objective truth is endemic to the industry.
It is endemic to human nature. There's no reason to believe that any industry is being particularly honest about their own raison d'être.
Yup, we would never had gotten nuclear power if it wasn't for the massive subsidies from the governments, the electric companies didn't want it. I wonder if Mr. Wang has added those subsidies into the equation.
However nuclear is calculated at true cost, solar and wind is not.
And nuclear is also calculated in the past plus its been underdeveloped the last 30 years.
Backup energy for wind and solar is not included wich have to be either coal, gas, oil or nuclear to compensate for the low capacity factor wind and solar which is at 20-40 compared to nuclear which is at 90.
So even if wind and solar were cheaper it only provides at the will of the weather.
I would love to se a proper non-partisan calculation where everything gets calculated in.
How exactly is the insurance that nuclear gets for catastrophic events priced in? You know, the insurance that no private insurer is willing to offer, so what's going to happen is the nuclear operating company declares bankruptcy and the tax payer pays for the cleanup.
Insured by whom? You need to understand how insurance companies operate: They gather data, they calculate the risk vs. the cost of paying out, they add a markup - that's your price. There is not enough data to do this with catastrophic nuclear accidents.
I understand how they work and I have done work both for insurance companies and re-insurers, nuclear power plants are insured a little different.
Here are some facts on how it works.
"Currently, owners of nuclear power plants pay premiums for $375 million in private liability coverage for each nuclear reactor they own. If there is an incident at a nuclear plant, and the $375 million in coverage is not sufficient, the owner’s coverage is supplemented by the second layer of protection, which is supplied by the nuclear power industry as a whole. Under the Price-Anderson Act, all reactor owners are committed to paying their share of any damages that exceed the incident reactor owner’s first-tier limit of $375 million—up to $111.9 million per reactor. Since are currently 104 reactors in operation, the amount that would be available in the industry pool to pay claims totals $12.6 billion (2011). "
It works because nuclear accidents are extremely rare and less dangerous than wind and solar let alone coal, oil and gas.
Thanks, this reminds me that I read this article half a year ago and forgot... my point is that it's not sufficient as the Fukushima Daiichi accident cost a lot more than $12.6 billion, let me just lazily link to my old comment on that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20014159
But what's the point though? Three Mile Island was fully paid by the insurance.
With regards to Fukushima the powerplant didn't kill anyone, the tsunami, on the other hand, did and of course, the public needs to pay for as it was force majure not the actual nuclear power plant that created the disaster.
And Tjernobyl was in a country which didn't have any private ownership so of course the public paid for it.
What other cases can you come up with where insurance didn't cover it?
It's pretty important to get things into proper perspectives here.
This isn't an insurance against catastrophic failure on the order of Fukushima or Chernobyl, which run into the hundreds of billions, if not trillions.
Of course you can have an insurance pool that covers arbitrarily small sums at arbitrarily low fees. That's missing the point.
Well you asked and I answered. In the case of Three Mile Island it was enough to pay.
"Of course, it is which is why there are two tiers. The other one paid by the whole industry.
But it's an absurd objection to begin with. All sources of energy have financial consequences if they go wrong, we use them anyway because the value they provide to society vastly outperform occasional disasters. And when it comes to human life, nuclear is far the safest, far safer than wind and solar. "
It's still not an argument against the safest and cleanest form of energy we have.
> All sources of energy have financial consequences if they go wrong, we use them anyway because the value they provide to society vastly outperform occasional disasters.
All energy sources aren't equal though. The value to society is cost/risk vs benefit. We're looking for the best deal here. The "catastrophic failure" scenario of wind energy is obviously completely different from that of nuclear power plants. That's a cost that's very difficult to estimate, but it is significant. You can't just ignore it.
> It's still not an argument against the safest and cleanest form of energy we have.
The fact that there's unfunded potential liabilities of enormous extent is an argument against nuclear energy. I'm not against nuclear energy at all, but let's be real here.
The energy wind and solar provides are also completely different. Capacity factor between 20-40 for wind and solar and 90 for nuclear. They provide less than 1% of the global energy and they don't have any other usage than providing energy plus the are unreliable and requires backup from other sources such as nuclear, oil, gas and coal.
I am not ignoring anything I am simply pointing to the fact that when we talk wind and solar the true cost isn't calculated whereas with nuclear it is.
And with regards to the insurance of catastrophes then Three Mile Island was paid by the insurance. Fukushima disaster happened not because of the nuclear powerplant but because of a tsunami, it was also the tsunami not Fukushima that killed thousands of people and Tjernobyl was owned and operated by the state so who else should pay for it?
So yes let's be real. No powerplant in the western world has yet cost taxpayers anything that wasn't covered by insurance and it has provided unparalleled clean energy which at least those who claim to worry about climate change as the biggest threat to humanity should support.
> I am not ignoring anything I am simply pointing to the fact that when we talk wind and solar the true cost isn't calculated whereas with nuclear it is.
I agree with you on wind/solar. I'm just going one step further and admit that with nuclear, the true cost isn't calculated either.
> And with regards to the insurance of catastrophes then Three Mile Island was paid by the insurance.
That convinces absolutely no one of anything. It's not what I was talking about as insuring a nuclear disaster. Don't waste your time making this point, it's worthless.
> Fukushima disaster happened not because of the nuclear powerplant but because of a tsunami, it was also the tsunami not Fukushima that killed thousands of people and Tjernobyl was owned and operated by the state so who else should pay for it?
It doesn't matter to the argument if a nuclear reactor blows up because of a tsunami, or an earthquake or Homer Simpson. It's a catastrophic failure case of enormous cost, and it's not insured, no money is being put into a fund to cover it, those costs are not taken into account when calculating the economics of nuclear energy. If such an insurance existed, it would be vastly more expensive for reactors built in a risk area like the Tsunami coast of Japan, so Fukushima Dai-ichi may have never been built.
I am not trying to convince anyone, I am trying to have a factual and principal discussion about insurance.
Again the three disasters we've had the one in the west that was the fault of the powerplant was paid by the power plant.
Of course you can't calculate the risk of being run by an opressive regime like the soviet union or ignorance/incompetence by those who granted Fukushima rights to build.
However they don't change the fact that nucelear reactors do in fact get insured and as far as I can see sufficiently. The other two other cases where either the state as the owner and thus insured properly, and the state allowing something to be built where it shouldnt.
Neither is an argument against nuclear and it's an unrealistic standard to set from my perspective and it's not a problem in the west.
I do however appreciate that we can disagree about this in a civilized manner.
Look, as far as the broader argument for or against nuclear goes, we are one the same side. I actually want you to have strong position.
> Of course you can't calculate the risk of being run by an opressive regime like the soviet union or ignorance/incompetence by those who granted Fukushima rights to build.
You can not by decree avoid ignorant people and/or incompetent people and/or less-than-ideal political frameworks. You need the wrong people to do the right thing.
> Neither is an argument against nuclear and it's an unrealistic standard to set from my perspective and it's not a problem in the west.
This is really just moving the goalpost. What if due to incompetence/negligence some reactor in a politically/economically deteriorating France blows up? Are you going to say "it's not a problem in America"?
You just keep repeating the mantra that it "isn't an argument". In reality it is an argument that "the other side" uses all the time. You're hurting your own credibility. You may disagree that it's a good argument, but it is an argument.
Now here's my standpoint: We can't by law require operators to purchase insurance that cannot exist. This is an impossible demand of "the other side", presented as a "cost" argument. It just doesn't help to say "but there is insurance!" when that insurance doesn't cover what we're actually talking about.
However, while we cannot calculate an insurance plan, we can pit the actual costs of either wind/solar against nuclear, including potential disasters and including CO2 prices and including the required buffering. I'm fairly confident that nuclear could come out on top even with one or two trillion-dollar disasters in the estimation. Remember, "the other side" just made a cost argument.
At another level, the argument for nuclear changes as the technology changes, newer and safer designs should have exponentially less dramatic worst-case failure scenarios. If "the other side" keeps factoring in speculative cost reductions in both production and storage facilities, so can we.
Insurance is a fringe discussion compared to general opposition to nuclear. Lack of insurance against catastrophic events is an even more fringe discussion and simply isn't a normal argument against nuclear. The normal argument against it is that it's dangerous, waste issues, expensive and so on.
I already stated my position on insurance of catastrophic events and someone isn't able to participate in good faith on that it wouldn't matter what I said anyway and my credibility would be tainted simply because of my position.
And to be frank, I've debated this enough and convinced enough people that nuclear is better than it's rumor. This is actually the first time anyone even mentioned insurance against force majure or communist regimes.
Anyway thanks for the discussion. I don't agree with you but but I appreciate the good faith argument.
> Insurance is a fringe discussion compared to general opposition to nuclear. Lack of insurance against catastrophic events is an even more fringe discussion and simply isn't a normal argument against nuclear.
Dissatisfaction with the way that insurance for catastrophic events is handled is in fact the main argument against expanding nuclear from the faction whose opposition is decisive in the US: the nuclear industry.
All other issues surrounding nuclear in the US are peripheral pieces of the debate over liability and insurance and whether or not the industry’s desired changes on that front should be met.
That seems highly doubtful. The amount of explicit and implicit subsidies to nuclear power via government programs is massive. And then add the fact that nuclear power is exempt from having to pay for adequate insurance...
There's lots of these in existence, basically every government has run them while deciding what policies to adopt. Here's a nice readable one that's fact checking a right-wing former Prime Minister who claimed that renewables plus storage was cheaper than coal or nuclear:
But for the question how to proceed with future energy it's completely irrelevant what solar+wind costed in 2005. We only care what it costs now and in the future. "Solar was super expensive in 2005, so we shouldn't build cheap solar in 2019" is not a useful or logical argument.
The key thing about the german renewable subsidies (and a few other countries, but particularly for solar it was mostly germany) is that they brought wind+solar from being overly expensive exotic technologies to cheap mass technologies.