The idea is to hide the truth, not uncover it.
Which is pretty much the standard operating procedure when it comes to defending nuclear power, which makes it near impossible to have a constructive debate on the matter.
(Elite naivete is a term I coined from hanging around in the orbit of elite schools and noting that people from prep school / elite backgrounds are often shockingly naive about how boots-on-the-ground reality works beyond their enclaves.)
I'm all for constructive debates on nuclear power generation, but I do want to point out that the snark is making it difficult for me to want to even try to engage you in a dialogue.
There's two pieces of news that should serve to illustrate my problems: First, the salt mine that germany used to store its low and medium radioactive waste in suffers from a water leak and may be about to collapse. It's currently unclear how fast the problem is spreading and they're trying to retrieve the waste but the current timeline spreads out into 2030 and beyond - if it's at all possible. If the mine collapses, we have a major spill right under germany. Now, there's other waste that's dangerous but there are only few substances that are as difficult to handle as radioactive substances. You can shields against most things with appropriate hazmat suits, but hard radiation is a serious problem, even for robots.
The technological implementation of power plants sacrifices safety on a lot of points due to budget constraints and human error: The pressure vessels of the most common (and most powerful) type of nuclear power plants are welded at critical points. The safety of these welds is being questioned [1] - the point that's interesting is that welds in those spots would not be allowed in "regular" pressure vessels for like coal power plants in Austria, for example. This is one of the reasons the only Austrian nuclear plant never went into service. Now, since the pressure vessel is obviously the most irradiated part of the plant it's really to expensive to check those welds from inside and outside - nobody wants to go for a dive in the plant. It's certainly up for debate whether the welds will hold or not. There's no real protection against airplanes crashing into a nuclear plant - it certainly could be done, but well - too expensive. There's a lot of risk that in theory don't matter, but humans and nature as a team have so far proven a strong tendency to overcome theory and make those risk matter - as seen in Fukushima.
All in all I think that fission power is theoretically safe, but to make it safe in practice is economically unfeasible.
[1] http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/laengere-akw-lauf... (sorry, german)
Some countries like Denmark already get 44% of their electricity from wind and biomass (other countries get more, but those are exceptions with hydroelectric plants).
It's too easy for people to reject nuclear energy based on an impossible standard that's applied nowhere else. No fuel source, even renewables once you start to consider the storage question, is "perfectly" safe. Everything, from wind to nuclear to the coal currently being burned, can only be considered in terms of risk. You weight those risks by a matter of degree. Coal sucks, for instance. Not just for the miners, who see significant increases in health risks such as cancer as a result of their work, but also for the communities near coal-burning plants that have to deal with released fly ash and the resulting radiation up to 100x that released from a nuclear plant generating the same amount of energy [1]. And that's not even taking into the account the very real and defined global implications.
Take your airplane example, for instance. Can you quantify it? Not really, given how insignificant the risk for such an event. Reasonable precautions, certainly. But putting the breaks on nuclear energy out of concern for potential destruction-by-airplane scenarios is no different than doing so for fear of potential destruction by asteroid strike. You're right that engineering is always weighing things through a cost/benefit analysis. That's the point, and it's not just limited to nuclear energy. But we need to be intellectually honest and hold different energy sources to the same standard when doing so, not cherry-picking at will.
In the linked article, I saw a few glaring problems. First, we're talking about decades-old reactor implementations (old BWRs, for which embrittlement is of less concern). Second, to date, there's no empirical evidence to support the concern that existing monitoring techniques are insufficient for monitoring embrittlement over time. If you're curious about reading about what issues have occurred (and have been caught), see [2].
I also have some large misgivings over Kropp's willingness to make a comparison to Chernobyl that has no basis in fact. Even if his nightmare scenario were to play out exactly as described, you wouldn't get a Chernobyl event. The RBMK reactor's flaws were well-known even during early design stages, but a number of factors converged in the accident (lack of training, over-classification that kept critical information from workers, disabled/limited safety mechanisms, corners that were cut in construction, lots and lots of graphite, etc.). Plus, you know, no containment vessel (!).
Quite frankly, you couldn't build a reactor like Chernobyl's in the United States (or even the western world more broadly). Even going so far as to imagine a scenario where some fiendish element wanted to purposely recreate the disaster here, they couldn't do it. So when people start drawing comparisons to Chernobyl, and use it to influence modern risk analyses, they're highlighting their own political biases and scientific ignorance. I don't think you were making this mistake, but some of the comments in that article certainly were.
Debating the subject is good. But we really do need to make sure that we're actually debating the options themselves, rather than skewed representations of one. That sort of flawed reasoning only serves to hamper us in the long-run. Given our energy requirements, current global trends, and the long-term environmental concerns, nuclear represents the only commercially viable energy source capable of solving our problems. We naturally want to do so safely, but there's a difference between risk management and risk aversion that amounts to sticking one's head in the sand. It's far, far too easy for the debate to shift towards the latter.
[1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r... [2] http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/pr... [3] http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Power-R...
One of the things I and many pro-nuclear people claimed was that todays reactors were designed with so many safeguards and precautions and what-ifs that the risk of a large scale disaster was so slim that it could pretty much be discounted. Chernobyl was an understandable one-off.
And people believed this story. The public's perception of nuclear energy was just about recovered when Fukushima happened.
Fukushima exposed real problems with TEPCO and their planning that went undiscovered by Japans nuclear agency or the IAEA. You would think that they would have planned for this worst case scenario, but they didn't (they did not expect a tsunami to knock out the generators). So how can we expect people to feel safe about other nuclear plants? We can again try to explain all the safeguards, but they will remain unconvinced because the trust is again lost.
Like if you tell an airline passenger that it's extremely unlikely for turbulence to cause damage to the aircraft and then half a wing breaks off, they're not going to trust you again no matter what you say, even though what you said was true.
So now we will have to wait even more years to gain the trust back by having a perfect safety record. Except for the next 20 years or so we will have gradual news to remind us about Fukushima as they bit by bit disassemble the plant and learn more about what exactly happened in the reactors.