If nuclear is to be built, there will be risk of serious accidents. The rational private response to this is to bound the liability to the nuclear operator via bankruptcy. So, in a severe accident, the cost imposed on society will not be covered by the operator. What's the response to this problem? Either imposed safety regulations, or requiring insurance (and the insurers then impose regulations as condition for insurance.) If de facto public insurance is provided (as in the US limited liability for accidents) then public regulation is a necessary consequence.
Well yes, that is what limited liability is. No argument there. We applied that concept to every industry and got fantastic results even though the absolute damage done by most industries is absurdly more than nuclear does. If you applied that exact logic to fossil fuels we'd never have made it to the industrial age. If you applied that logic to the industrial age we'd never have entered the industrial age, it was an OH&S disaster even before what happened to the health of the bystanders.
I'm not sure why we've looked at our collective history and decided the West's biggest mistake was ignoring the Luddites. The costs of nuclear are nothing compared to the potential we walked away from or even the costs we accept as part of standard day-to-day existence.
The maximum cost of a serious nuclear accident is well beyond anything we see in other industries, save perhaps the cumulative effects of CO2 pollution. The answer is not to excuse nuclear, but impose regulations on other such cases as well, and for similar reasons.
> The maximum cost of a serious nuclear accident is well beyond anything we see in other industries, save perhaps the cumulative effects of CO2 pollution.
That isn't so. If I just look up a random explosion I get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Beirut_explosion which is more damage than most serious nuclear accidents. 218 deaths, 7,000 injuries, 300,000 homeless. That is pretty bad.
And, again, your logic would involve people looking at the industrial revolution and deciding against it.
I'm talking about financial damage, not deaths. The value of the human lives lost is relatively modest compared to the hit to (for example) property values.
You might object that the financial damage is due to unwarranted concerns by the public. Even if that were the case, they would be legally actionable.
If nuclear is to be built, there will be risk of serious accidents. The rational private response to this is to bound the liability to the nuclear operator via bankruptcy. So, in a severe accident, the cost imposed on society will not be covered by the operator. What's the response to this problem? Either imposed safety regulations, or requiring insurance (and the insurers then impose regulations as condition for insurance.) If de facto public insurance is provided (as in the US limited liability for accidents) then public regulation is a necessary consequence.