We could have many, many more Chernobyl and Fukushima style disasters, and nuclear would still be safer than real-world coal.

(But that's an easy target to beat.)

All failure events happened due to incompetence and/or greed, and increasingly unlikely due to new designs and improved protocols.

And even assuming those accidents are unavoidable, coal still produces more health problems and deaths.

I'm glad we've abolished greed and incompetence in this future world.

(I'm also not sure why so many people are playing the nuclear/coal dichotomy when we got into this discussion from wind power and the default backup for renewables is now CCGT?)

The situation is completely different now. Reactor design is much safer, operational safety is at another level and safety risks are more clearly understood.

We have had six nuclear accidents with more than local effects in the last sixty years, with hundreds of reactors running. None of them could have happened with modern designs.

In modern nuclear reactors, safety is not an issue.

So intentional circumventing of safety measures and (cost) cutting corners is not possible sich the new tech?

Almost in every industry i can think of there are countless examples of how profit is traded for safety. Why should this be any different?

Safety measures which cannot be intentionally circumvented (except by planting a bomb, I suppose) predate Chernobyl by many years. The RBMK was a horrible design which threw away passive safety[0] for convenience and cost savings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety

x2.

Modern designs for things that can fail dangerously incorporate features that cause the system to go down a branch that ends in a safe failure mode high up the tree rather than allowing the possibility of a less safe failure many more steps down the tree.

It's like how Uhaul overbuilds the living crap out of it's trailers then puts relatively (compared to the rest of the system) light duty tires on them. Better to have idiots blow out tires than other less safe failure modes.

Not sure what your point is.

My point is many technologies were thought of being safe untill you encounter this one error, iceberg, negligence.

Yeah, but at this point, I think the risks of modern reactors are understood well-enough to say with confidence that safety is not a major argument against nuclear energy.