I'm saying it catastrophically destroys my trust in the industry.
You're saying that you trust an industry that...
> In 2008, the San Onofre plant received multiple citations over issues such as failed emergency generators, improperly wired batteries and falsified fire safety data. In its annual review of 2011, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) identified improvements but noted that in the area of human performance, "corrective actions to date have not resulted in sustained and measurable improvement”.
There's a history of human error and negligence within the industry. That history of errors and negligence is why I am against nuclear power.
Another view is that this demonstrates that the plants are engineered to be safe enough that despite these types of mistakes, incompetence and fraud, nuclear costs far fewer lives than the alternatives.
That argument sounds precipitously close to the reasoning that led to the Challenger disaster: "Even though this isn't supposed to happen, we've seen it before and it was fine" leading to a slow eroding of safety margins over time until at some point the shit hits the fan.
Except the NRC doesn't have a tolerance for erosion of safety, at all. Look at history, if anything they've gotten more strict over time. Once identified, there is strict procedure about rectifying it.
The problem with nuclear is that it is so heavily regulated that every little mistake that would fly under the radar in any other industry is instead explicitly called out, cited, and a resolution demanded. Which gives great visibility. But then some people misleadingly characterize it as "more unsafe" simply because its more visible, when really the alternative (followed by coal, natural gas, solar, wind, hydro) is to not call problems out at all in the name of "deregulation" which is an absolutely more dangerous way to go about things.
We've seen what happens even when plants are mismanaged to the point of failure, and the total death toll has still been a tiny fraction of what coal causes every year.
I'm more worried about the coal plants that are still spewing ash and uranium into the atmosphere and killing people by the tens or hundreds of thousands every year.
That itself is not a strong argument against nuclear power - because the exact same thing happens in every industry. If you look around carefully - at your workplace, at the shop you buy your food in, at the construction workers building that block nearby - you'll find staggering amount of fraud and incompetence almost everywhere. It actually makes one wonder how our increasingly complex world still somewhat works.
So keeping in mind that incompetence and fraud are commonplace and not something industry-specific, you have to consider what the numbers tell you about the safety of each option, and those numbers turn out to favour nuclear energy. Keep in mind that those statistics implicitly take into account all that incompetence and fraud you're worried about.
Do you install your own brake pads on your car? This goes for a lot of parts on the car you may drive. Yes, it's just your passengers and the possible victims of an accident, but there are a lot of things that can go wrong on your car. Is your trust in the auto-repair industry similarly 'catastrophically destroyed'?
The last time I did that was in 1978 on a Rabbit - with no experience whatever. It was a piece of cake and they worked fine. I did the timing belt, too.
I sure as heck wouldn't try it on my 1999 Golf. I can't even change the headlight bulb.
It's not that hard, just a little awkward because you can't really see how it screws in while you're doing it because the light assembly is sealed except for the bulb hole.
There's a history of human error and negligence within the industry. That history of errors and negligence is why I am against (nuclear, coal, gas, wind, solar, tidal, hydro) power.
In case it wasn't clear, my point is that this history of errors and negligence is present in literally every industry. Literally all of them.
