While nuclear facilities in most countries are required to contribute to 3rd party insurance pools, liabilities are capped by law and the hosting government assumes liability. In the US the Price Anderson act does this and the pool insurance limit of $12 billion is clearly grossly inadequate, as Fukishima demonstrates. Other estimates of $5 trillion for a major accident have been made, others at $500 billion.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149197016300415Saying that nuclear power plants are insured, while in fact they have pushed liability for a serious accident onto taxpayers is the sort of slight of hand the industry is famous for.
The same slight of hand through manipulation is used to cover up the spent fuel issue; in the US the spent fuel disposal cost is artificially low (set by government) yet the government has in fact no disposal system; the failed Yucca mountain program is scientifically recognized as a technical farce.
The power industry has been manipulating governments and legislation and propagandizing the public since their inception. They are masters at it, far better than the tobacco companies. They continue. One good book on the topic is "Power Struggle" by Rudolph and Ridley.
They will continue to do what any large corporation does by charter- maximize shareholder profits by any means possible. Our world needs to incentivize moral and social values for large corporations, somehow. We have created a monster.
There are plenty of good articles about the grim financial realities of nuclear power; they have failed miserably on the economic level because of huge cost overruns in construction, high operating costs, and short operational life (due to radioactive embrittlement of the critical plumbing in cooling systems), even ignoring the real costs of waste storage. The problem isn't a liberal conspiracy.
As a former engineer I very much like the look of new fission nuclear designs which don't rely on an active cooling system for shut downs. This would avoid Fukishima type disasters. (In retrospect, you have to wonder about why you would press into a service a design that required a huge functioning active cooling system for extended periods on "shut down"). Alas, initial trials of "pebble bed" did not look good from what I've read. Perhaps someday we will even have fusion power, but for now, it seems that "fusion at a distance" (the sun) is our best bet for nuclear energy.
