Do you consider the law regarding car liability insurance to be a subsidy? It requires you to carry liability insurance up to a finite amount, despite the fact that you can do much more damage than that with your car, and then bankruptcy law will shield you from paying the full amount.
This is the same kind of insurance nuclear plants have: they’re require to have an insurance on up to $X of damages, and then “someone else” bears any cost beyond this.
Nuclear plants can’t be insured for the damages in a meltdown. Not because the risk is so huge that it should never be done, but because any jury award would be effectively infinite, irrespective of the actual damage. There’s no point to buying insurance when the uncovered liability increases in lockstep with your insurance coverage. However, the actual meltdown risk is extremely small and even the required insurance is effectively overinsuring the plants.
This nuclear plant “insurance” can’t be compared to what FM/FM had because they are able to continue operation and making profits after a “meltdown”, while a nuclear plant would be over and done with.
If you don’t like the kind of uncovered liability nuclear plants have, they’re the least of your concerns—you really should be advocating an end to driving, since no driver can meet the insurance standard you seem to expect out of nuclear plants.
Now, with that said, you are correct that comparisons of green technologies to coal do conveniently leave off the damage that coal plants spill off onto other people and are therefore misleading. I’ve long railed against assessments of coal that ignore the cost of dumping toxic crap into people’s lungs. Example. (ETA:Better example.) Still, that requires an objective accounting of environmental costs, not just (as is often the case) assuming they’re infinite.
Making drivers not responsible for damages they cause is a massive subsidy, and without it we’d have far more investment in car safety (and I mean genuine kind like replacing human drivers with robots, black boxes, and compulsory alcohol testers before it lets you drive, not current air bag waste of time), and far fewer deaths and injuries.
Pardon, but I don’t see how this is responsive to my comment.
1) Drivers are made responsible for the damages they cause, up to the limits imposed by bankruptcy law; the law also attempts to ensure [sic] that each driver on the road is capable of paying up to $X in damages. What they are not made responsible for is arbitrarily large damage they could potentially do, but this is unavoidable—no one is capable of setting aside that much money, even solar power operators (or rich people).
2) In absence of “making drivers not responsible for damages they cause”, we most certainly would not have more investment in car safety; we wouldn’t have cars, period. (BrE: Full stop.) Or, without the multiple negatives: If everyone driving had to be capable paying all damages they could ever potentially do with their vehicle, no one would be allowed to drive, or use most technologies. I don’t think you’re understanding the implications of this requirement.
Yes, drivers—and nuke plants—should carry insurance. Maybe the required amount (in either case) is too high. Or too low. Or derived from the wrong process. But no one can insure unlimited liability, so the safety improvements you describe just wouldn’t happen if that were a requirement; the technology just wouldn’t be used. But once you accept that people should only have to insure up to a finite amount, and given the low, self-borne risk of nuclear plants, you must accept that they already meet this.
3) Arguably, the reason we don’t already have self-driven cars is precisely the phenomenon I warned about: uncovered liability increasing in lockstep with coverage. The average person who kills someone with their vehicle is typically required to pay a lot less than when it is done by a wealthy corporation. Given jury reactions to new technologies and wealthy corporations, if someone actually did offer self-driving cars, they could very well have to pay out more in damages, even if they were safer than 99% of human drivers!
Do you consider the law regarding car liability insurance to be a subsidy? It requires you to carry liability insurance up to a finite amount, despite the fact that you can do much more damage than that with your car, and then bankruptcy law will shield you from paying the full amount.
This is the same kind of insurance nuclear plants have: they’re require to have an insurance on up to $X of damages, and then “someone else” bears any cost beyond this.
Nuclear plants can’t be insured for the damages in a meltdown. Not because the risk is so huge that it should never be done, but because any jury award would be effectively infinite, irrespective of the actual damage. There’s no point to buying insurance when the uncovered liability increases in lockstep with your insurance coverage. However, the actual meltdown risk is extremely small and even the required insurance is effectively overinsuring the plants.
This nuclear plant “insurance” can’t be compared to what FM/FM had because they are able to continue operation and making profits after a “meltdown”, while a nuclear plant would be over and done with.
If you don’t like the kind of uncovered liability nuclear plants have, they’re the least of your concerns—you really should be advocating an end to driving, since no driver can meet the insurance standard you seem to expect out of nuclear plants.
Now, with that said, you are correct that comparisons of green technologies to coal do conveniently leave off the damage that coal plants spill off onto other people and are therefore misleading. I’ve long railed against assessments of coal that ignore the cost of dumping toxic crap into people’s lungs. Example. (ETA: Better example.) Still, that requires an objective accounting of environmental costs, not just (as is often the case) assuming they’re infinite.
Making drivers not responsible for damages they cause is a massive subsidy, and without it we’d have far more investment in car safety (and I mean genuine kind like replacing human drivers with robots, black boxes, and compulsory alcohol testers before it lets you drive, not current air bag waste of time), and far fewer deaths and injuries.
Pardon, but I don’t see how this is responsive to my comment.
1) Drivers are made responsible for the damages they cause, up to the limits imposed by bankruptcy law; the law also attempts to ensure [sic] that each driver on the road is capable of paying up to $X in damages. What they are not made responsible for is arbitrarily large damage they could potentially do, but this is unavoidable—no one is capable of setting aside that much money, even solar power operators (or rich people).
2) In absence of “making drivers not responsible for damages they cause”, we most certainly would not have more investment in car safety; we wouldn’t have cars, period. (BrE: Full stop.) Or, without the multiple negatives: If everyone driving had to be capable paying all damages they could ever potentially do with their vehicle, no one would be allowed to drive, or use most technologies. I don’t think you’re understanding the implications of this requirement.
Yes, drivers—and nuke plants—should carry insurance. Maybe the required amount (in either case) is too high. Or too low. Or derived from the wrong process. But no one can insure unlimited liability, so the safety improvements you describe just wouldn’t happen if that were a requirement; the technology just wouldn’t be used. But once you accept that people should only have to insure up to a finite amount, and given the low, self-borne risk of nuclear plants, you must accept that they already meet this.
3) Arguably, the reason we don’t already have self-driven cars is precisely the phenomenon I warned about: uncovered liability increasing in lockstep with coverage. The average person who kills someone with their vehicle is typically required to pay a lot less than when it is done by a wealthy corporation. Given jury reactions to new technologies and wealthy corporations, if someone actually did offer self-driving cars, they could very well have to pay out more in damages, even if they were safer than 99% of human drivers!