[danenania]

There clearly is a line where we don't do projects if the tail risk is too high, just like you wouldn't build a house next to a volcano that is known to violently erupt every year or decade--if it's every 1,000 years, it may be a different story. The question is which side of the line nuclear energy is on.

I basically agree that it's on the "worth doing" side given the right conditions are met. These conditions plainly weren't present in the USSR in the Chernobyl days, and probably aren't present everywhere nuclear plants are operating today either, but that's not a reason for a blanket anti-nuclear stance given its many benefits.

My point is simply that comparing historical results isn't relevant to the tail risk discussion. Pro-nuclear people should stop using this argument imo--it makes it seem as though they don't understand the position they're arguing against.

Sidenote on nuclear weapons: my sense is almost everyone does agree that the tail risk of a disaster is unacceptably high, but because game theory makes a drawdown extremely difficult, they're considered a grim necessity. If we could somehow destroy all nukes simultaneously and make it impossible to build new ones, we'd increase humanity's odds of survival quite a bit by doing that.