> Civilian Nuclear industry was always pretty tiny compared to the competition
There is lots of civilian nuclear industry. But they all depend on government money, regulation, funding, insurance, ... And they prefer to have monopolies - like in France.
> I wish the nuclear industry was half as good as Greenpeace at promoting their ideas.
I think you are mistaken. The failure of the nuclear industry is self made. Entirely.
> Counties like France have been at CO2 levels that would basically solve global warming (or as close as you are gone get without replacing transportation fuel) but the rest of the nations did not follow.
Luckily - we would have a world full of nuclear reactors and large amounts of material nobody knows to handle. Plus the nuclear technology would be a wonderful entry for nuclear weapons.
> The West started out making new reactors all the time and the reactors built back then were incredible cost competitive and up to that point nuclear had a speed of adoption unseen by any technology ever.
We got many out-dated reactors with very little safety, no storage and lots of nuclear waste in return.
> if you shut down fully function reactors for political reason
If. But it was not the case. There was a large earth quake. The nuclear industry was exposed as a fraud with nuclear installation in areas with high seismic risks.
> The US Regulatory agency told Japan that these reactors were exposed but for political reasons Japan wanted to build on the coast.
See. The nuclear industry is not in a vacuum. In old nuclear installations there is so much money involved, that there is a high corruption risk.
If you don't deal with these types of risks, then the best technological solutions can and will FAIL. Technology is always embedded in a society and since billions of revenue streams are involved, we can't expect that safety first will prevail. Instead greed and corruption is much stronger. Or the will to have a nuclear industry to have technology transfer for weapon production. In many countries the weapon technology was first. Like in the UK, where the first power plants were modified designs used to create weapon material.
And in the case of Fukushima we are talking about Japan - a technological advanced nation. We are not even talking about the shitty nuclear industry in, say, Russia.
> alse. The reactor didn't care about the seismic activity it had no issue what so ever.
Of course they do. Every reactor NEEDS a full inspection after a major earth quake. Claiming that nothing happened WITHOUT inspection is impossible. Power plants are built to certain levels of expected events. If new information about events and their risks is available existing installations need to be approved again...
> In fact had the reactor itself not been shut down, it could have delivered the energy for its own cooling system.
If? It did. If it hadn't failed it would still be running. But it failed. Badly. Multiple ways.
> The nuclear industry global has the least amount of deaths per energy produced.
I try to explain again: the clean-up of Fukushima will cost probably half a trillion dollar.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clearing-the-radi...
> Basically 0 people died from civilian nuclear in the Western nations
It's just that a single incident caused a many year long shutdown of basically all nuclear reactors in Japan. Many of them will never be restarted again. The economic loss is unbelievably large.