Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

Calculating an actuarial probability was never the problem. You can't know the lower bound on the probability of something that has never actually happened, but you can calculate an upper bound based on the period of time it hasn't happened, which is all you really need. They can calculate what the premiums should be.

The issue is that you're asking them to carry a hundred billion dollars in insurance, but insurance companies have capitalization requirements. AIG's market cap is less than seventy five billion. They can't write an individual policy they don't have the resources to pay out on in the event of a claim, regardless of the probability that it actually happens.

So the problem isn't the risk calculation, it's the amount of insurance you want them to carry. The solution is to find someone who could actually pay out a claim that large in the unlikely event that it comes to that, which could only be the government, so that's what they did.

So I would propose, to hedge against the perennial optimism of industry apologists who will never have to back up their claims, have the investors who bet on this also fund an escrow account to the tune of 10x or so of the construction and other initial costs, to make up for gaps in their wildly positive projections. These funds could be invested and returned to the original sources if the project turns out to remain safe and financially worthwhile after x number of years. Not enough money to fund 10x? Then don’t do the project until there is.

However, I do not have good enough background to vet the source well. Are they missing something obvious?

Also, I was not talking about worker safety, rater about everyone's health, from the miner to the person living near the power plant.

Only small pilots have been deployed because batteries are just getting cost competitive now for the first time, and utilities are super slow to pick up new technology. They're not used to living in a world where there is new technology, but they are slowly waking up.

It's going to be like digital versus film cameras. Once the critical cost threshold is crosses, they will scale like crazy. And batteries are trivial to scale to huge or small sizes. We could start putting them in all substations and massively increase reliability of the grid in addition to switching to 100% renewables. It's just a matter of cost, we know how to engineer and build them. With nuclear, it's a matter of cost, and we know how to engineer, but we don't know how to build or scale.

Recognising that this is a minor portion of a larger post - there are a lot of industrial companies that couldn't possibly cover the damage if something goes badly wrong (eg, explosives supplier flattens a major port, 3rd world mining accident, electrical utility causes wildfire, most mid-sized building companies if a skyscraper collapses, etc). Even many insurance companies won't pay out if a flood or fire hits a city, because they can't afford to cover large-scale disasters. Contamination in drinking water is also a pretty big risk. At that level of probability, the only way of dealing with these threats is government. No other organisation else has the manpower or resourcing to deal with rare catastrophes.

It is a fact that liability for a nuclear catastrophe would overwhelm a companies ability to pay. However, we do a lot of things that are more risky and more costly at that level of probability. The fact that there is risk is a very real consideration. That fact we can't insure it is not - there are too many things where, if a rare event happens, the liability cannot be shouldered by a corporation.

Fukushima cleanup, one of the worst disasters we've seen in 30 years, seems to have cost about $15 billion damages + $60 in compensation [0][1] vs $250 billion due to the actual disaster that caused the nuclear plant to fold (the tsunami). And this is as an unexpected, low probability, cost. If a corporation can't handle this, it is tiny bikkies to a government to cover the $15 billion in actual cleanup. And the probability of the government needing to act is tiny to start with. The risks here are so small we don't even talk about them outside the context of nuclear power.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos... [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/03/10/after-fiv...