[cameronh90]

I'm a huge fan of nuclear power at a technological level, but we have to acknowledge that fundamentally the safety of nuclear power depends on trust. If a NPP is designed, built, and operated correctly, it's perfectly safe to have one next door. I would personally be entirely happy to live next to one in my country (the UK).

There's not much that an individual can do to verify the safety of any given nuclear installation, however, and, bluntly, the global track record isn't great. Even countries with regulatory environments that we'd expect to be very effective have had INES 4+ incidents, and some of those could have been far worse were it not for pure luck. You could rightfully counter that any large civil engineering project relies on trust in a similar way, but a bridge collapse or even dam collapse, while horrifying, cannot conceivably render a large area uninhabitable for hundreds of years.

I think the reason that regulations in nuclear power have become overly burdensome is ultimately an attempt to try to build trust and demonstrate to the public that the risks are being taken as seriously as possible, in an attempt to prove that a worst-case nuclear disaster will never happen. You could think of it as safety theatre or something, but were it not for these regulations, in a democratic country, the public would simply not allow NPPs to be built, and therefore complying with these regulations is just an inescapable cost of that form of power generation. Arguably we even give NPPs a pretty significant subsidy by limiting their total public liability.