We’ve had a decent amount of discussion in this thread about nuclear power as a clean energy source. As part of the reading challenge thread, I just read a book by Gregory Jaczko, former head of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and it’s really disturbing. To the point that I no longer think nuclear power is really a viable alternative in its current form.
I wrote more at the links up there, but here’s the quick summary: the nuclear power industry owns the regulators, through political and economics pressure. That means safety is taking a back seat to profit. Nuclear power fail states are at best extremely dangerous and at worst massive disasters, so this is a really dangerous situation. Correcting this would require either significantly different (and much more expensive) reactor designs, or the political will to fix the regulatory system…and neither of those is anywhere close to reality. Until that changes, nuclear power should be off the table.