This is the point for me. Capital intensive projects with massive safety concerns and massive environmental liabilities are a recipe for regulatory capture and corruption, because they need to work hand-in-glove with the state to succeed. This is the formula that has led to accident after accident at chemical plants all over the world, some of which have been far more deadly than even the worst nuclear accidents. Civil servants need to be on board, or the project fails, and once they're on board, they tend to overlook malpractice.
True but the distribution of energy and the whole setup is entirely different as related to the issues I mentioned.
Regulations surely have held back updated nuclear tech, I agree, and some of this may have been inflicted by the older entrenched owners of the older tech, and their lawyers and captive politicians, at the expense of newer nuclear startups.
If I had to rank things I’d say that solar, although not viable everywhere, is my favorite.
I can tell you the reason.
The larger problem with nuclear is that it is prone to central control, taking away self determination and individual freedom of ordinary citizens in how energy is produced and paid for.
Other options like fossil fuels (gasoline, propane, etc.) but even more so solar, wind, and small scale hydro, all coupled with batteries as needed, offer much more freedom and personal choice about how people get their energy and how they pay for it.
The nuclear industry has lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, and large corporations all enlisted for profit and control. These players colluding together have even managed to get the government to make the industry and exempt from liability for nuclear accidents!
As I see it, nuclear projects tend to be magnets for corruption, huge boondoggles, and don’t account for, much less pay, their full long term costs. And on top of that they force consumers to bear the cost in many ways, through taxes, lost property values, capture of government, and resulting opportunity costs.
The topic of waste is important, but it’s almost a red herring compared to the scale of the above control problems.