There's a reason it sounds crazy. Several 'inherently safe' reactors overheated, cores melted, they exploded and spread 'inherently safe' radiation over large populated areas. That radiation caused the government to forbid people living there, and to spend tens of billions to try to clean up that widespread radiation. The hundred of billions in decommissioning costs of those reactors could have created liberating renewable energy and storage. Instead they're being wasted on fixing 'inherent safety'.
Had the exposed 100s of tons of stored-in-the-air waste fuel rods lost their cooling water, they might have melted into huge blobs of uncontrollable, unquenchable masses, throwing uncountable curies of radiation into the atmosphere. We all were very -lucky- that they didn't. And it was nothing but luck. Luck is not inherent.
The problem is when these dice are rolled, every living organism on the planet has to live with the outcome. Some call that an acceptable risk. Sounds crazy to me.
The reason is because humans don't think very well at the large scale, and tend to obsess over the small.
In this case, there are massive positives to nuclear and people focus in very hard on the literally-happened-twice-with-pre-CAD-designs accidents. These accidents are bad, but pale into insignificance compared to the good that these nuclear plants have done. And Fukushima was in the context of a disaster that was outside design spec, so it arguably does represent a significant improvement over Chernobyl. The design specs for nuclear plants have been continuously tightened, so I doubt it would have been possible with a modern design.
Everything about the Fukushima disaster suggests that the response has been a bit paranoid. Objectively speaking, the evacuation was overzealous and according to the comments here today the Japanese government decided that the standards around what was acceptable background radiation were too unreasonable so wound them back.
Compare Fukushima to global warming (which I am occasionally assured is an civilization level threat). The civilisation level threat is business as usual, the nuclear solution is a Fukushima-city level threat. Governments routinely sign up for risks that are more likely and more expensive than Fukushima; albeit more spread out in time. Given what the environmentalists are saying about Global Warming it is clearly the case that everyone who could should have switched to nuclear power back in the 90s.
Even now, when it is starting to look more obvious that solar is the path we will choose, it is still a pretty reasonable suggestion that the environmental costs of mining, producing and installing the solar panels will outweigh the damage done by a nuclear disaster, just in a less concentrated fashion. Given that the Chinese have demonstrated how quickly a new city can be built the argument in favor of solar is - ironically - mainly economic rather than environmental.
Had the exposed 100s of tons of stored-in-the-air waste fuel rods lost their cooling water, they might have melted into huge blobs of uncontrollable, unquenchable masses, throwing uncountable curies of radiation into the atmosphere. We all were very -lucky- that they didn't. And it was nothing but luck. Luck is not inherent.
The problem is when these dice are rolled, every living organism on the planet has to live with the outcome. Some call that an acceptable risk. Sounds crazy to me.