There’s a statistic that floats around the internet claiming more radioactivity harm from coal power than from nuclear power, based on the principle that coal power is essentially aerosolizing tons of particles with ever-so-slightly-higher-than-background radioactivity and there’s a lot more coal than nuclear.

One could probably derive a similar statistic for how much harm nuclear over-regulation has caused. Perhaps of the form “Chernobyl killed 60 people directly through acute radiation, killed 60,000 indirectly through elevated cancer rates due to spread of radioactive material, and killed 6,000,000* with its second-order effects of supporting nuclear over-regulation that caused increased use of coal and gas energy”. (* This number is completely made up)

It seems to me that changing over-regulation is nearly impossible, as it requires making suicidally unpopular arguments: “we shouldn’t weigh the risks”, “we should care less about safety”, “don’t think of the children”, etc. The workable solution is to find or make a receptive regulatory environment (perhaps in a small country with large reserves of nuclear fuel and large unpopulated areas to isolate reactors in, like say Australia), use massive banks of nuclear power to power commensurately massive carbon capture plants that turn airborne CO2 back into synthetic coal and synthetic gasoline, and then export these “completely clean conventional fuels” to the rest of the world.

Using synthetic coal to run a coal power plant is essentially a zero-capital plant retrofit achieving guaranteed zero emissions. Putting synthetic gasoline in a gas station is essentially an over-the-air upgrade to any conventional ICE vehicle making it guaranteed zero emissions. It’s sort of like carbon offset credits except it bakes the carbon offset directly into the product instead of relying on fragile and game-able links like “we planted a tree to offset this pound of coal”. A potent offering and one that’s hopefully hard to regulate against as well.