Nuclear is unviable because of economics, not engineering
afr.com
afr.com
The posting you're quoting is cleverer, but overall, what it does is discuss various aspects of added regulations and omit one. There's so much verbiage that one can easily overlook the missing part: Why regulations were added.
The Three Mile Island accident, to take an example, led to new regulations. The posting you're quoting could have argued that those were bad, but it doesn't. It just sort of zooms out, looks at the changes from a distance, turns the sum of many concrete improvements into a bad general development. Good concrete details become "red tape".
That said, it's wrong to start from the assumption that because they exist, they are necessary. First, we need to define what "safe" means. And a safety threshold that is a fair trade-off between public acceptance and the industrial feasibility of the sector.
One might think, sure, increasing safety is always necessary. But we must accept the fact that zero risk does not exist in any technology and will never be completely eliminated in any way. And we already accept the risks of dams and renewables, so it means that a threshold of what is accepted as safe exists, and we can define it.
It seems universally accepted that renewables are "safe." So why not take the deaths per GWh produced and use this value to define a nuclear power plant as safe?
On page 175 (chapter 3.5) of this report compiled by the European Union research center, it shows how third-generation EPRs are already several orders of magnitude safer than renewables, per GWh produced. Demonstrating how they are infinitely safer than any other energy source. https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC1...
Therefore, if we decide to define renewables as safe, we can deduce that modern nuclear power plants are very safe. Yet why is this not perceived?
Obviously, the answer is very simple, the death from installing a panel is an isolated case often limited to a single individual, and often does not make the news. Nuclear, however, even if it causes one death (like Fukushima), is discussed for decades. Besides, the dangers related to the dispersal of radioactive material often cause even more fear than the deaths from the plants themselves, despite rarely having caused tangible damage.
With this said, it's important to note that this fear does not find reflection in the numbers, which remain the reading closest to the reality of the facts.
Finally, from my point of view, even if nuclear were less safe than this, it would still help fight climate change, which should lead to millions of millions of deaths, if not billions. It would be a very logical intellectual step to accept the risks even of a less safe nuclear (and cheaper), because the long-term benefits would definitely be beneficial.
The article itself is positing a cause. It is difficult to work out what the actual causal chain is for nuclear energy being so expensive. And even if it were only due to pointless rules, it would be very difficult to trim down to necessary rules.
> accident led to new regulations
But we should not be relying on major accidents to improve our nuclear plant designs.