Those power plants wouldn't have been allowed to be built... so yes? With the modern regulatory environment, those three nuclear power plants would never have melted down (because they wouldn't exist).

But you can't both have cheap nuclear and the current regulations since they are in conflict.

But I think molten salt thorium plants can offer superior safety

Molten salt reactors might provide superior safety (the thorium is irrelevant to that). However, they also would likely imply higher operating costs, because now instead of being sealed in fuel elements your fuel is flowing through a larger part of your reactor, and volatile fission products are escaping into the off gas and have to be trapped in another system (which will have to be cooled to prevent melting). So you now have complex systems that are too radioactive for anyone to touch for maintenance. Reactor structural elements are also now exposed to more neutron radiation as well.

There was less than 100 deaths from chernobyl, and only one person died directly from fukushima[1]. I suspect more people have died from falling off roofs while fitting or cleaning solar panels than that.

You're correct that nobody builds rbmk reactors any more, but others of the design continued to operate safely for many years.

[1]https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...

> There was less than 100 deaths from chernobyl

There may well be tens of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl. No, we can't state that these deaths absolutely occurred/will occur -- they are spread throughout large populations, mixed into the vast number of naturally occurring cancers -- but technology regulation is not like criminal prosecution where things must be proved beyond reasonable doubt. Technologies are not innocent until proven guilty.

> Technologies are not innocent until proven guilty

That depends entirely on the technology, and who is paying who. Fossil fuels have been proven guilty of numerous sins time and again and are still relentlessly defended as innocent. Leaded fuel in particular enjoyed an undeserved benefit of the doubt. Food additives are another category of chemical with very permissive regulation, provided they don't cause lab rats to immediately keel over.

Technology regulation is unprincipled at best and outright corrupt at worst, and even with the most pessimistic estimates nuclear power has the best safety record per watt of any power generation technology (and it's not close).

That's nice, but it's no justification for that earlier poster lying about the number of people killed by Chernobyl. There's very good reason to think the number is much larger than 100.

Fossil fuels being bad is an argument for getting off fossil fuels, not an argument for nuclear in particular.

Did you read the source I linked? It gives a good estimate.

    "2 workers died in the blast.

    28 workers and firemen died in the weeks that followed from acute radiation syndrome (ARS).

    19 ARS survivors had died later, by 2006; most from causes not related to radiation, but it’s not possible to rule all of them out (especially five that were cancer-related).

    15 people died from thyroid cancer due to milk contamination. These deaths were among children who were exposed to 131I from milk and food in the days after the disaster. This could increase to between 96 and 384 deaths, however, this figure is highly uncertain.

    There is currently no evidence of adverse health impacts in the general population across affected countries, or wider Europe."

Yes, and you totally ignored the cancers that could occur due to low levels of additional radiation in the population at large. You are simply presuming that such cancers cannot occur.

What you are doing here is demanding that the cancers actually be demonstrated, requiring that radiation be treated as innocuous until it can be conclusively shown it isn't. This is the mindset behind those ranting against the linear no threshold theory of radiation carcinogenesis.

But regulation doesn't work this way. Nuclear isn't something that must be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Having a fukushima and a three mile island happen every year would be easily worth it if it made nuclear 20% cheaper (feel free to do the maths if you dont believe me). And it would actually make things fourfold cheaper judging by the difference in price per KW between the 80s and now.