> Of the reliable sources of energy, nuclear is safest and the least subsidized.

How do you evaluate this? Do you have a summary of estimated subsidies per MWh for different generators?

My understanding is the same as the comment you are responding to, that nuclear subsidies are significant, ~6-10USD/MWh on insurance alone. I would be happy to be wrong on this. On a good day we pay ~EUR25/MWh for nuke electricity in EU day-ahead markets, as a scale point; 8EUR/MWh is a significant subsidy.

First, I want to make it clear that my claims are about relative subsidy, rather than absolute subsidy.

Second, the nuclear insurance subsidy is not really a subsidy, since the taxpayer is only on the hook in the case of an accident, which is not only extraordinarily unlikely, but also mitigated many times over. The calculation of the implicit subsidy to nuclear power comes from highly motivated speculative accounting by CATO, whom you should generally think of as playing the role of a law firm working for oil and gas and against alternative forms of energy production. There are a range of values which could be assigned to the "implicit subsidy of nuclear insurance", and the opposition lawyer has obviously chosen the absolute highest end of that range.

It is difficult enough to calculate the probability of a nuclear reactor meltdown, but we have observational evidence that it is at least many dozens of times less likely than say, a hurricane, and each of those is generally more costly than even the worst nuclear disaster in history. The damage wrought by the tsunami at fukushima, for instance, was many times greater than the damage wrought by the meltdown at fukushima.

There is a private component to nuclear insurance, as well, paid by the operators, which totals, across all nuclear plants, approximately 10 times the total damages incurred by the three mile island incident every year. It is extremely unlikely that a nuclear accident will ever exceed these damages.

This is in stark contrast to other historical insurance requirements. As a case study, I recommend learning about the early history of oil spills starting with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Torrey_Canyon and the subsequent founding of TOVALOP in 1968. Up until that point, oil transport insurance was implicitly subsidized by the nature of a limited liability corporation. Note that this was not an artefact of the times, since insurance requirements for the nuclear industry were implemented by congress a decade earlier, in 1957.

On the other hand, we subsidize coal and natural gas implicitly by not charging them for the use of their exhaust channels and also not structurally supporting torts for worse health outcomes with no easily identified proximate cause. For a concrete example, I think we have a pretty good idea of the number of additional hurricanes per year we can expect as a result of carbon dioxide emissions, but we do not require oil and gas to pay for marginal additional hurricane insurance, despite that doing demonstrably more damage than even very bad nuclear meltdowns. The unsuitability of tort as an avenue of collecting externalities is an enormous implicit subsidy for the fossil fuel industry.

We are 100% in agreement that societies subsidies of fossil generation far outstrip anything else.

My question was about your claim that nuclear has the lowest subsidy of any generator.

> It is extremely unlikely that a nuclear accident will ever exceed these damages.

I mean, the Fukushima cleanup (~$500B) is costing about three orders of magnitude above the liability ceiling ($450M) of the private insurance component of US nuke liability.

First of all, these numbers for the Fukushima cleanup don't make sense. 500B is the annual budget of medicare, or roughly the market cap of a FAANG. Your source appears to be wikipedia, so I looked into it, and their figure is from a scientific american article in which the Japanese government is quoted as saying 15 billion USD for the cleanup and 60 billion USD for relocation damages. Quite a lot of money, but definitely an order of magnitude less than the cost of the earthquake and tsunami themselves. A "private think tank" in Japan then wildly conjectured this number to actually be between 400 billion and 700 billion USD, and for some reason, this is the figure that Wikipedia uses. So, interestingly, I am claiming that this is the same phenomenon as before. This think tank might even be the CATO institute, for all we know.

Second, I said for reliable power. That was sneaky of me, but gas, coal, nuclear, and to some extent hydro, are the only reliable power sources I am aware of. Wind is not completely random, but cannot be relied upon, and solar cannot be run at night. Hydro is reliable, but represents a much bigger population risk than nuclear, with no real possibility of safe failure. I like hydroelectric power, I think it's neat, but it's definitely a sleeping dragon.

Assuming your lower estimate of 15B + 60B, that remains two orders of magnitude above the insurance policy you claim "is extremely unlikely" to be exceeded, so arguably my point stands.

"Reliable power" is well.. this keeps coming up, and it's always this black-and-white thing; sometimes the wind doesn't blow, so you can't rely on it.

And then the other side will counter that the downtime of wind is predictable, unlike that of nuclear (see the need to raise the price ceiling in EU day-ahead markets to deal with the unplanned nuke outages in France going on right now). This side will say the predictable 45% capacity factor of wind is preferable to the unpredictable 90% capacity factor of nukes.

In reality, a stable energy system is built by combining energy sources of different strengths. Wind and solar provides bulk cheap power most of the time, with hydro and nukes ramping to match production changes. This is identical to how the grid is already ramping to match demand changes every day.

We see this dynamic every day in EU markets, with wind+hydro slotting together, hydro flexing up and down as wind ebbs and flows. You can see this live in the "Origin of Electricity" charts on electricitymap: https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/SE

Honestly curious about how you come to the conclusion that the risk of hydro is that much bigger than nuclear. One would assume that this is a pure engineering problem and therefore "mitigated many times over" just as well as in nuclear?

> All power generation is subsidized

My point is, the combination of wind, solar, storage is orders of magnitude less subsidized. If you account for risks (nuclear) and externalities (fossil fuel). This is not propaganda. But your claims about nuclear are.