[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.