[Retric]

It’s not a US or western problem. China, Saudi Arabia, Russia etc also use minimal nuclear power because of basic economic issues. It’s fine under 10%, but as you scale up the problems get worse.

PS: Rosenergoatom which runs Russia’s nuclear power plants has seemingly made progress in lowering operating costs, but it’s not clear how much of that progress is real. Though Russia is planning to ramp up to ~35% nuclear and is pushing a lot of R&D which is promising. Then again they have issues with solar.

[irq-1]

Bill Gates thinks he can run nuclear power-plants at a profit, and safely. Nationalizing plants that aren't safe would let investors try. Governments could reduce up-front regulations by punishing reckless investors.

[Retric]

Considering the ~US$187 billion dollar cleanup effort after the most recent failure, just let them try can be an extremely expensive proposition. Operate for 50 years then say, sorry cleanup is your problem now suckers is similarly an issue. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup

That’s the catch 22, you need to not just be extremely safe but able to convince others outside your organization that it’s going to work. Having been burned twice by failure modes outside the original context it becomes even more difficult to innovate. Novel designs have novel problems and unknown unkowns can be a huge deal.

Can you get away with fewer guards? Well probably, but the minimum is not clear. How about thinner walls, again probably but can you convince others it’s a good tradeoff? Now extend that to everything.