> the systems were just too expensive.

Maybe, but the world is changing. What is safer: some nuclear incidents once in a while, or +4 degrees in the world and a whole strip of land around the equator becoming unlivable to the human species? We're talking billions of refugees here.

I think we need to realise how bad the situation is and how worse it is going to be before we say that nuclear energy is "risky".

"safe" is a spectrum. While coal is allowed to kill millions of people a year, the safety level of nuclear in the US was raised to "no matter whatever happens no one ever anywhere must have harm come to them" and that's not realistic. Solar kills orders of magnitude more people than nuclear! But we haven't regulated rooftop solar out of existence, plus that wasn't even an option 50 years ago. That's 40 years we didn't have to be poisoning the Earth with coal.

> No reactor has yet even reached the operating age of 60 years. That 80 years number is wholly speculative.

Ontario's Bruce A site (Units 1-4) have an age of ~45 years, and has just finished refurbishment (ahead of schedule and under budget) to run for another few decades:

* https://www.ctvnews.ca/london/article/refurbishment-of-bruce...

Ontario's Pickering B nuclear site (Units 5-8) have an age of ~40 years, and are about to be refurbished to run another 30+ years:

* https://archive.is/https://www.thestar.com/politics/provinci...

So while the 60-80 years has not been hit, it is probably less on the "speculative" side of spectrum and more on the "probable" side.

The American regime has recently solved this problem by removing safety requirements - they have de-recognized the linear no-threshold model of radiation damage, which means the official fact is that there is a threshold of radiation that's safe to receive. That threshold is, of course, just above whatever one of the nuclear reactors they're about to build will emit. They removed the "as low as reasonably possible" design goal which means it's now allowed to dump radioactive waste into a river to save money

Georgia nuclear power plant cleared for 80-year operating life

https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/georgia-nuclear-powe...