Chernobyl was pretty stupid. Bad reactor design and rather bad operator decisions.
Part of the Fukushima problem was an insufficient sea wall. They did get unlucky with a 7.4 magnitude quake. It was stupid to put the back up generators in the basement where they were flooded. There is a summary of some of the human errors and corruption here
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/30x14946
Three mile island was largely operator error. There also appeared to be corruption during the clean up.
Private companies are always trying to cut costs. Government organizations are often subverted by the industry. America and Western Europe have a fairly decent nuclear safety record. I think it is just plain difficult to avoid corruption for any regulatory organization.
The potential for a serious nuclear incident involving 100,000+ deaths exists. Both Chernobyl and Three mile island could have been much worse. If things had been worse, there was a potential for hundreds of square miles to be contaminated for several decades.
It is very difficult to design a nuclear reactor the can survive operator error and government corruption. There is also the potential for terrorist attacks on reactors.
On the other hand, we do seem to have a very big CO2 problem and maybe we need to take the nuclear risk. As far as I can tell, we cannot rely on solar and wind for more than 70 or 80 percent of our energy needs. Maybe geothermal or wave power combined with solar and wind could be used to eliminate the need for fission nuclear power.
My general position is that even if many more people die installing rooftop solar and wind turbines, just falling off roofs and ladders, it's a better plan, politically, than nuclear. Not that nuclear can't be done safely, but that even done safely, the optics of single-point failures, which will happen, are so bad that nuclear becomes political loser. Just build more wind and solar and the distribution infrastructure to move it around.
Furthermore, the near-zero opex for renewables frees up more money to build out more renewables and eventually, when needed, storage.
The cost for that transformation was mostly on the books of the utility and were being paid down despite the low energy prices they were offering.
That a huge success, and any signification technical industrial nation could do the same. France was already going towards that path so if you would replicate it it would likely be 25 years but i that time you could like build 80 much more modern higher utilization reactors.
Germany had a Green transformation that with all the subsidies and everything will have cost 100s of million and they still have lots of coal (and their remaining nuclear) and will not have fully solved the problem for quite a while yet. In the time since French built nuclear the Germans mostly paid higher electricity prices and the most recent subsidy for energy prices will cost Germany 100s of billions. Not to mention the huge cost in terms of health and the environment to operate all the coal plants.
So had the Germany 'Energiewende' been to go from 30% to 100% nuclear, they could likely have done it in 20 years flat. Assuming a start date of 2000, that would be now. They could be 100% nuclear by now with reliable low cost energy prices, a 100% green grid. I don't think there is really any question if this would have been possible. Germany had all the knowlage and skills required. Even assuming some plants are delayed, they by now could easily finish 8 plants at the same time, they would be done within the next couple of years for sure.
This could have been financed easily as well. Assuming they build 50 new reactors (lets say 1.4GWe), assuming a conservative of 5 billion per reactor (prices way lower if you actually mass produce). 250 billion $, that's 6% of their GDP. Germany debt is 60%, and would go to 66%. German 30 year bond yields of 2%.
In return they would get assets that would produce green energy reliably at fixed price for literally the next 80-100 years. And that is assuming they do it with mostly the same tech that France did.
This would have clear been a superior path for Germany in almost any way you look at it. Their citizens would breath clean air now. They would have reliable low energy prices (as most of the French consumers of nuclear plants still enjoy). And they could tell Russia to go fuck themselves.
Likely the would also get contract from the Polish and all over Europe and continue to build them making it a profitable export.
France would then have to choose between mothballing their reactors and buying neighbors' power, or taxing their own citizens to keep the breeders operating at their radically higher cost. The latter would be an unpopular choice.
In summer, of course, the reactors would all need to be shut down in any case, because there is not enough water in the rivers to cool them. France would be buying neighbors' power, then. They could continue, in fall, or spend big bucks to fire up the reactors again.
French tolerance for folly has limits.
Overbuilding, storage and transmission for sure allows very close to 100% renewable generation. It will not be as _cheap_ as it is today though.
We could make a law today that forbids the construction of new fossil fueled plants. We could make a law that said that by 15 years the national grid will not allow the use of fossil fuels to stabilize the grid when demand exceed supply, and that by then people will either have to live with power outage or creating storage that match capacity with demand.
What we can observe in the world is an significant and continued increase in fossil fuel capacity, and energy politics being dependent on fossil fuel costs. Even in country with way over 100% wind capacity like Denmark, they still can only consume about 40% from wind. The remaining 60% comes from other sources like imports that are directly linked to fossil fuels. Getting those 60% to be generated from storage would be a major victory.
Magnitude 9.1, actually.
Earthquakes in different places can be compared only on a common scale.
And history shows that pretty much every nation that has tried it, including the Soviet Union did it with high safety.
Can you name a single nation that has tried to use nuclear power on the large scale and has failed with a large number of deaths?
So it really is like, if you just do it, its most likely the safest thing you can do.
And again, this is soviet union reactor technology that doesn't apply anyway.
Instead of moving those people investing even 10% that amount of money in new hospitals, trains and bike lanes (or name X other things) would have saved far more people.
So if you want to be really hard core you could say, right, we should never built that type of reactor again. But we have never done so in the West anyway so its really none issue in any rational discussion about energy policy.
this is the whole thing about nuclear power. There's always plenty of data on how, from a technical standpoint, nuclear energy can be generated completely safely. There's always the hindsight observations how, none of this had to happen. But implementing technical solutions requires institutional capabilities to pull it off.
Case in point if you google for "Fukushima Was Preventable" you get a ton of hits that refer to well regarded studies, interviews, and journalism that refers to the ways in which TEPCO failed to plan and respond appropriately to the disaster.
But if you google for "Fukushima Was Not Preventable" then you get this: https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2022-06-18/fuk... just this year, Japan's legal system still claiming it was not preventable. It's easy to read between the lines on that, as the reason they decided this is because they are avoiding paying out damages to thousands of people harmed by this negligence. That is, they are lying.
From this, I draw the same conclusion I always have about nuclear power. Sure it can be done safely. But who is actually willing to do that enormous, massive effort, without cutting corners, covering up problems, acting negligently, and then ten years later just continuing to lie about it? Private companies? no way. Governments? we would hope, but wow, nuclear is really , really expensive and complicated to get right, and often not sufficient as practiced by mere human instutitions.