> The annual revenue alone of the worlds ten largest insurance companies is about 20 thousand billion USD [1]. This sector is prepared to cover larger risks than most governments - for a somewhat competitive profitable amount.
I think you mean two thousand billion. Which is problematic since there are more than twenty nuclear power stations in the US (each of which would need to be insured), even if that wasn't revenue.
Insurance companies are competitive. If they take in a hundred billion dollars, they pay out more than ninety in claims the same year. They can't pay a claim using the money they're already using to pay other types of claims.
> Of course is wasn't - revealing and paying the resultant premiums is the problem, which is why governments make alternative arrangements for nuclear.
The resultant premiums wouldn't be that bad if it was only the risk of a nuclear disaster they had to account for.
But a smart insurance company is going to take into account that US courts have a way of connecting sympathetic victims to deep-pocketed or well-insured corporations, even when there is only a tangential relationship with them, when it's the only way to save a devastated community. For example, if Fukushima had happened in the US, there is a decent chance that courts would have tried to tack a lot of the cost of the damage from the tsunami on the plant operators. Or for another example, PG&E and the recent wildfires in California.
That's a different kind of risk, but it's one an insurance company that doesn't want to go bankrupt has to account for, and it's also the one that makes buying that amount of insurance prohibitively expensive in the private market.
Sorry right I did overcount that. But that is still 2 trillion USD - revenue per year. It establishes the scale of this sectors financial clout. Insurers payed out $135 billion USB in North America last year for natural disasters, and business is continuing as usual. Nuclear plants liability are capped in north america at 13 billion USD the nuclear industry is simply exempt from arranging full cover - unlike other industries. Its not really viable to contend the arrangements are not exceptional and are beyond the capabilities and interest of modern financial arrangements.
This statement > "which is problematic since there are more than twenty nuclear power stations in the US" shows a misunderstanding about the insurance business. It is not necessary to have assets to cover worst case events everywhere simultaneously. I expect you do understand that but have not given this subject your best attention.
> Insurers payed out $135 billion USB in North America last year for natural disasters, and business is continuing as usual.
Because they expected to. If you take in $145B in premiums and pay out $135B in claims, everything is fine. If one year they took in $145B in premiums and paid out $235B in claims, where does the rest of the money come from?
In theory they could collect the premiums and accumulate them over time so that by the time there is a claim there is the money to pay it, but that allows you to pay a single claim of that size in year 50, what is covering it in year one?
> Nuclear plants liability are capped in north america at 13 billion USD the nuclear industry is simply exempt from arranging full cover - unlike other industries.
What other industries? I don't see oil and coal companies each having to be insured against claims for billions in damages from climate change. PG&E isn't covering the full liability from the camp fire, they're filing for bankruptcy.
> This statement > "which is problematic since there are more than twenty nuclear power stations in the US" shows a misunderstanding about the insurance business. It is not necessary to have assets to cover worst case events everywhere simultaneously. I expect you do understand that but have not given this subject your best attention.
That's assuming you can consider them all to be independent. The problem with very low probability events like this is that if they do happen the cause is often another very low probability event. You get something like the Yellowstone Supervolcano or a coordinated terrorist attack and all the claims come at the same time.
Or even at the same time as other types of claims -- you get damage to a nuclear plant or three from a ten thousand year storm or an 8.5 magnitude earthquake and now you're paying that claim on top of the disaster claims from what caused it. Insurance companies want to pool risk, not assume 100% of the damages from a massive disaster with a single dependent cause.
All industries need to arrange cover for accidents (this should not be news in an argument about industrial insurance and liabilities). Some companies are big enough to hold their own funds, for example Shell has payed out $20 billion in settlements for the Deepwater horizon accident. That is more than the $13 billion dollar fund arranged to spend in the event of nuclear accidents in the whole of the US.
The idea of holding oil companies liable for climate change has a ring to it, but insurance wont cover it because there is no legal precedent. There is legal precedent to claiming damages on industrial accidents and nuclear industry accidents. If one nuclear plant fails badly for any number of reasons and fallout is blown towards a city or across valuable farmland, the claims could easily exceed 13 billion USD.
> All industries need to arrange cover for accidents (this should not be news in an argument about industrial insurance and liabilities).
Rarely in the amount of the theoretical maximum amount of damage they could possibly do. In practice when a company has more liability than insurance coverage, they end up in bankruptcy and it's the insurance policies of the victims that end up paying out, or some kind of government assistance. This is especially true for very rare and very large claims, because nobody really carries that much insurance.
For example, Boeing no doubt has insurance, but their worst case failure mode is something like the hypothesized worst-case scenarios for the Y2K or Y2038 bug where some integer rolls over and every plane they've ever made crashes into the ground at the same time. There is no way they have enough insurance to cover that -- it would be a trillion dollars. But neither do we expect them to, because it's very unlikely even though it could theoretically actually happen.
The same kind of thing could happen to a major auto company, or really any company that runs the same software on a million different pieces of industrial hardware. A company could sell a million pacemakers and have them all fail at once, or elevators, or emergency dispatch equipment. None of them are insured for that amount of liability.
The oil companies are rare in the sense of having extremely deep pockets, enough to cover a major claim like that on their own, but they're about the only instance of that. And even they would be completely bankrupt if the courts ever start allowing claims against them for the damage from climate change.
I think you mean two thousand billion. Which is problematic since there are more than twenty nuclear power stations in the US (each of which would need to be insured), even if that wasn't revenue.
Insurance companies are competitive. If they take in a hundred billion dollars, they pay out more than ninety in claims the same year. They can't pay a claim using the money they're already using to pay other types of claims.
> Of course is wasn't - revealing and paying the resultant premiums is the problem, which is why governments make alternative arrangements for nuclear.
The resultant premiums wouldn't be that bad if it was only the risk of a nuclear disaster they had to account for.
But a smart insurance company is going to take into account that US courts have a way of connecting sympathetic victims to deep-pocketed or well-insured corporations, even when there is only a tangential relationship with them, when it's the only way to save a devastated community. For example, if Fukushima had happened in the US, there is a decent chance that courts would have tried to tack a lot of the cost of the damage from the tsunami on the plant operators. Or for another example, PG&E and the recent wildfires in California.
That's a different kind of risk, but it's one an insurance company that doesn't want to go bankrupt has to account for, and it's also the one that makes buying that amount of insurance prohibitively expensive in the private market.