And how fast can we build them? They need to start to come online in the next few years to do anything to stop global warming.
Because the Japanese government's failure to stop TEPCO from this miss-management is just as bad as any engineering oversight. And Japan isn't a third-world country. Japan runs a tight ship in most regards, tighter than the US and many EU nations. Other countries with a nuclear industry are far more troublesome: Iran, Pakistan, India, Ukraine, Russia, China... But if Japan can fail so spectacularly, all risk estimates around nuclear power are futile.
For me that qualifies as unknown unknown. Just a question of perspective. Japanese society, government, maybe even their nuclear regulatory agency (whatever that is) trusted TEPCO to know this shit.
I'm not worried about the exact same thing happening in a German plant. I'm worrying about something else happening WE didn't know or care about. Compare commercial aircraft accidents. Every time a passenger plane crashes, there's a big investigation, lessons are learned and thus safety is improved. Still, crashes happen again and again for new reasons, often not anticipated, sometimes Human error of pilots or other personnel, sometimes of engineers, sometimes other causes. But: At most one plane full of people died. If every time the plane went up in a nuclear mushroom cloud or contaminated a couple square kilometers worth of inhabited real estate, I guess we'd rethink air travel altogether.