I have no idea how you get the idea that oil spills aren’t covered by insurance. In fact, denying insurance is the easiest way to keep vessels out of your waters because they just won’t go where they aren’t covered. If something isn’t cleaned up properly it’s certainly not because of the lack of insurance.

Your next example was the Beirut explosion. First, I’m pretty sure there was somebody there who was liable. The issue is, though, that if that event wasn’t covered by insurance (which I guess it wasn’t, just because it was a shitty country where you maybe didn’t have to have insurance) I’m pretty sure it serves as a good example that that was an idea that was dumb as fuck as this single event essentially tanked the country’s economy for years or decades. I’m not sure what exactly your point is in this case except showing that there are some underdeveloped countries where you don’t have to make sure your shit gets cleaned up after you and if it really hits the fan you take down the whole shithole with you. I’m not sure if that’s how you want industries to operate where you live and I’m also not sure of that’s your idea how nuclear plants should be operated. But, and that’s my point, that’s how they fucking are. Every single one of them.

The derailed train I don’t get at all. There’s a whole chapter on that page that deals with how they spent hundreds of millions on the cleanup and settlements. I’m sure a lot of it is covered by insurance companies. What makes you assume something else?

Your last counter example is sewage being fed into rivers covertly and possibly illegally. Like… Yeah, so? If you’re willing to break the law I guess you don’t care about insurance either. Still not how companies should be run.

Go read yourself:

A 2020 study found that lost nuclear electricity production has been replaced primarily by coal-fired production and net electricity imports. The social cost of this shift from nuclear to coal is approximately €3 to €8 billion annually, mostly from the eleven hundred additional deaths associated with exposure to the local air pollution emitted when burning fossil fuels.

And remember that the pollution which kills people just because breathing smoke and ash is bad, it’s also radioactive.

Now that really got me curious. Seriously. It’s the first time I ever heard about that, so thanks for the input. However, I couldn’t really confirm it. First of all, just a look at the graphs of how energy sources developed…

It’s just not there! Even more curiously, Wikipedia writes it differently on another page:

As they shut down nuclear power, Germany made heavy investments in renewable energy, but those same investments could have “cut much deeper into fossil fuel energy” if the nuclear generation had still been online.

So, that’s already much less drastic on its wording and more in line with the data above and my prior understanding of the situation. Still, that makes it weird… So I looked at the source your Wikipedia page cites.

Our novel machine learning approach combines hourly data on observed power plant operations between 2010-2017 with a wide range of related information, including electricity demand, local weather conditions, electricity prices, fuel prices and various plant characteristics. Using these data, we first simply document that production from nuclear sources declined precipitously after March 2011. This lost nuclear production was replaced by electricity production from coal- and gas-fired sources in Germany as well as electricity imports from surrounding countries

Emphasis mine. But fucking hell…

Did you take a look at that paper? I mean apart from the fact that they put all their figures into the appendix, which makes it extremely annoying to read… Instead of looking at the data how power was actually produced, they just say their data doesn’t have that info but they just came up with an algorithm that pulls the information out of its random for-ass and says it was probably coal. Subsequently, they use their made-up data as if those hallucinated junk tables were given facts:

The largest increases, both in absolute and percentage terms, are from hard coal and gas-fired production. Specifically, annual average production from hard coal increased by 28.5 TWh (32%) while gas-fired production increased by 8.3 TWh (26%). Finally, the phase-out caused net imports to increase by 10.2 TWh (37%) per year on average.

Just look at the graphs that trace the actual production further up in this post… One third more hard coal? It’s just not there! So, no, that source doesn’t hold up and I really wonder who’d think that such a source should be used in the Wikipedia.

We just don’t have the alternatives ready to go for that just yet

I disagree. Look at the gross electricity production graph. Just install more capacity than required and be done with it. As renewables produce electricity that’s cheap as fuck, you can just install three times the capacity you need. Subsidise home and large scale batteries to even out energy usage and install large scale batteries and gas plants to hop in if required. Use the excess energy from your overcapacity to produce hydrogen. Push people and industries into hourly updated tariffs so they have a reason to not use electricity if it’s scarce (and thus expensive). There are lot of methods. In Germany, an industry-heavy country, renewables are already delivering more than 60 percent of the electricity, up from essentially nothing thirty years ago, and I haven’t heard a good argument why this couldn’t be increased further. We have the alternatives and they are right here, right now, and they work.