>People say that like it is a law of nature. It isn't. Prior to COVID I was regularly moaning that the government was destroying lives with their overzealous safety standards.
Given how friendly nuclear with safety standards has been, nuclear with those pesky "overzealous safety standards" would be a hoot.
I’m not qualified to say whether Nuclear is a viable option or not, but the level of regulation is ridiculous compared to other energy sources. For instance, every Coal plant releases more radiation than any nuclear plant is permitted to. That’s far from a level playing field.
However the potential maximum release from a coal plant is… something. The maximum accidental release from a nuclear plant is one that can cause absolute devastation of a country or entire region.
That’s substantially only true of the designs we stopped building in the 1970s (outside the USSR, where safety standards mixed “overbuilt” with “crucial details not addressed due to internal politicking”, resulting in disaster). Chernobyl could have been so much worse.
That said, when comparing planetwide, the mean outcome is more important than the worst case. Eg: on average, over it’s lifetime, including the explosion, Fukushima was less polluting than a brown coal plant.
Modern are only passive safe in the sort term, these designs still need active cooling in the long term. So if humans disappeared tomorrow these reactors would eventually release a great deal of radioactivity into the environment. It’s not a serious concern outside of wide scale natural disasters, but over hyping modern designs isn’t a good idea as it eventually harms perceptions of the industry.
Given how friendly nuclear with safety standards has been, nuclear with those pesky "overzealous safety standards" would be a hoot.