[Retric]

Don’t underestimate the direct effects.

Three mile island directly cost well over 1 billion in 1979 dollars (2+B today) just in terms of destroyed assets and initial cleanup costs. The wider impact was even more expensive.

Such a visible failure changed the risk/reward calculations which then hurt the nuclear industry quite a bit. We did keep building US nuclear reactors afterwards, but they were never that profitable in the first place making the industry very sensitive to disruption.

Timeline of US reactor construction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident#/me...

[amarshall]

The problem as I see it is that the costs of Three Mile are acute and fairly direct. Whereas fossil fuel power may have even an even bigger cost (from the environmental impact), but as they are slow, chronic, and indirect, they’re easily overlooked.

Humans just seem to be disproportionately responsive to rare, acute events.

[seadan83]

To "slow, chronic, and indirect", I would also add "spanning most of a human lifespan." For these kinds of things we often don't realize something is brand new as of our lifetime. Said in another way, if something changes in our life when we are 2, we will tend to think that thing was always that way, even though it is very recent.

An example, forest fires in the West (coast US). They have always been around. So, many say, nothing new here. Yet, we don't quite grok that they are 10x worse than 50 years ago [1]. Thus, if you look at it across multiple human lifetimes we can see there is a radical difference. Across one lifetime and it might not seem like it is so different.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/24/climate/fires... (has several graphs that indicate magnitude more fire & magnitude more burn area)

[Retric]

Those differences need to be prices in via Coal taxes or the market doesn’t care.

However, the market does care if something has proven to be a risky bet. Meltdowns involve actual money on the line.

[acjohnson55]

Looks like Chernobyl really killed nuclear.

[Retric]

Compare active reactors + reactors in construction during three mile island vs where nuclear production stabilized.

Things stabilizing like that is very suspect. It probably has to do with capacity factors and the long lead time, but I wouldn’t assume there’s no correlation.

[acjohnson55]

Yeah, I'm not saying there's no correlation, just that you see the full-on halt kick in after Chernobyl. Which makes intuitive sense to me. Even though our reactors were very different from Chernobyl, the incident was so much more extreme and the distinctions were probably largely lost to the general public.

[boringg]

You have it backwards. Industries that are profitable are subject to disruption.

[Retric]

Wrong kind of disruption. If your profit margins are 0.5% then a tiny dip in demand, 2% spike in interest rates, or spike in steel costs etc can be devastating.

If you’re a software company with profit margins over 40% then you don’t care much about rent etc.