[lovemenot]

A friendly rejoinder.

Concorde was the safest form of commercial air-travel, until one day in Paris it wasn't.

Nuclear currently has around 3% share of power generation globally. More share than Concorde had, certainly. But not enough to say definitively that nuclear's comparative safety is not just because of its comparative scarcity. It's been a low-hanging fruit.

Scale up to 30% share and be necessarily exposed to new risks which were not exposed at current levels of deployment.

Many of these additional risks would be from economic factors: we'd probably never achieve 30% share without a less rigorous and much less costly safety regime.

[arcticbull]

30% is a completely arbitrary level that you’ve picked with no justification. I’d suggest you cite some sources to provide depth to the argument that 30% of world power is materially different.

[lovemenot]

Arbitrary yes. Pick another number that is substantially larger than current share.

I am not going to be able to give statistics, but to me it's obvious. After all these decades, what's been holding nuclear down to its present market share is its economics of safety. Cost overruns all but bankrupted Toshiba, just to give one recent example.

If you want an order of magnitude more installations, you will have to relax those constraints.

So we cannot use today's safety record as proof of tomorrow's safety if we also expect massive increase in deployment.

[jaakl]

Which day in Paris? Single accident did not increase overall air travel safety significantly, regardless of what impression you could get from the press.

[lovemenot]

A single Concorde crash drove that aircraft's safety profile down from the very best to amongst the worst per passenger mile of any aircraft.