Strong safeguards are also needed in iron smelters and steel foundries, in ammonia synthesis, and in making aluminum. In the mining of coal and extraction of oil and natural gas.
Given strontium 90's specific activity of 142 curies/gram (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19680020487), in mass terms that's 14 micrograms/kg for the LD50. Gram for gram, strontium 90 is about 1000 times as acutely deadly as arsenic, or 3 times as deadly as the chemical warfare agent sarin. A commercial power reactor of 1000 MWe output can have an inventory of tens of kilograms of strontium 90 in the core [1] along with even more acutely dangerous shorter-lived fission products.
Nuclear reactors are safe because of careful defense-in-depth in their engineering and operation. They need deeper, more stringent safety systems than steel plants or ammonia plants because they contain substances much more toxic than those found in steel plants or ammonia plants. You also see extreme safety practices in facilities that handle non-radioactive poisons, if the poisons are potent enough:
In all those cases if something goes wrong workers can be sent in afterwards to rebuild things. If something goes seriously wrong in a nuclear power plant the owner is out one nuclear power plant.
Yes, in large part because the safeguards are not nearly as strong. (And a lot of the rest is because the safeguards impede research on how to make nuclear cheaper.)
Arguable, but I won't. The strength of the safeguards is not the problem.
The surface problem is that the rules keep changing. That's part of the expense: repeated redesign, over and over.
The underlying problem that causes that, is that western societies do not want nuclear power. More: they actively dislike it.
It's all academic now anyway, at least as far as stationary electric power generation is concerned. PV power and storage is far cheaper, and the growth of the gap is accelerating.
The LD50 for strontium 90 in hamsters (90 day survival) is 2 millicuries per kilogram: http://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.2307/3573895
Given strontium 90's specific activity of 142 curies/gram (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19680020487), in mass terms that's 14 micrograms/kg for the LD50. Gram for gram, strontium 90 is about 1000 times as acutely deadly as arsenic, or 3 times as deadly as the chemical warfare agent sarin. A commercial power reactor of 1000 MWe output can have an inventory of tens of kilograms of strontium 90 in the core [1] along with even more acutely dangerous shorter-lived fission products.
Nuclear reactors are safe because of careful defense-in-depth in their engineering and operation. They need deeper, more stringent safety systems than steel plants or ammonia plants because they contain substances much more toxic than those found in steel plants or ammonia plants. You also see extreme safety practices in facilities that handle non-radioactive poisons, if the poisons are potent enough:
"Inside Fort Botox"
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-10-26/inside-fo...
[1] https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/6822946 See table 2.2 "Fission product inventories"