What is your definition of contaminate? If Devanney is correct that low doses of radiation are acceptable—and I believe he is—then much land which is described as ‘contaminated’ is in fact perfectly liveable. (Also see the people who illegally live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone). For a reasonable definition of ’contaminate’ then, it follows that a nuclear accident contaminates much smaller areas of land and is less expensive.
One issue is that it is not possible to rigorously prove it’s livable because the parameter you are trying to measure—extra cancers and subtle damage—won’t show up for 20-30 years. Over such a long timescan it is difficult to even tease out causation. Your data will be incomplete, your subjects won’t all have lived long enough for any radiation damage to matter, some of them smoke, etc. But for the sake of argument I will let the conclusions be conclusive that radiation is harmless below a threshold.
I agree with you that the NRC’s decision making is not rational in that it is not factoring in the consequences of a decision to the host society. It’s factoring in the consequences of the decision to the NRC. This is true for most regulatory agencies, at best they are captured by not wanting to do something that endangers their own reputation.
Anyways even if all of the above is true the innovation cost I mentioned above isn’t there. Nuclear is also small market size in that many advancements do not make economic sense because few reactors are being built, and this would remain true if more were being built up to a point.
Solar and batteries are enormous market scales, and thus many improvements make economic sense.
Fair enough. Unfortunately you can walk around with a geiger counter and perceive the dangers of nuclear in the 2 disaster areas. You can’t perceive the coal pollution in most areas except when it gets bad enough.