So that's the aftermath of the first commercial small nuclear power reactor.

[1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Vallecitos-react...

[2] https://www.northstar.com/northstar-closes-ge-hitachi-vallec...

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nrc-certifies-first-us-sm...

If you mean that the NRC holds back designs that are more exotic than plain old light water reactors, maybe so, but that isn't relevant to the "looming power crisis" mentioned by bpodgursky up-thread. Light water reactors are the most affordable and fastest to build everywhere in the world. Pressurized heavy water reactors (like CANDU) are also mature designs. Everything else is slower and more expensive to build, with very limited operational history compared to the dominant water based reactor designs.

I am not against nuclear, but I do believe we would be fine without it too.

Additionally, that economic might means that we have very high labor costs, and the ways of fixing things that are cheapest may be different for California than other parts of the country. But the utility is incentivized to spend as much as possible on these efforts (they take a fixed percentage of costs as profit), and the regulators have no clue what's going on. So proposing a method that's the cheapest elsewhere will get a rubber stamp.

Grid fees pay for damage caused by wildfires.

Unless, you mean renewable being "unstable" in the sense of no wind, no sun equates to no power. Then yes, but only until the fuel is spent.

However, renewables are stable when resources are available, stable in providing consistent clean fuel and stable in cost on upkeep than say one of a nuclear reactor.

Which is why you combine all three.

> Show me any place, anywhere, which is using renewable for baseline energy production 24x7.

El Hierro, the smallest of the Canary Islands, holds a unique distinction as the only island to operate solely on wind and waterpower for 28 consecutive days.

The facility ingeniously combines wind generation with pumped storage hydroelectric generation. Now that's cool.

https://www.renewableinstitute.org/el-hierro-a-renewable-ene...

Those seemingly stuck on advocating nuclear power do not seem to understand the advances made both in storage technology and in system design to deal with intermittency.

Please get your prices to 2025.

Three Mile Island containment.[2] The entire huge concrete and steel building around the reactor and support equipment is the containment vessel. When the reactor failed, radioactive steam escaped into the large containment vessel, where it was contained.

[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/appendices/fuk...

[2] https://www.ans.org/news/article-3916/the-three-mile-island-...

https://www.missionsecure.com/blog/cyber-attack-india-larges...

The Iranian nuclear program was also air gapped.

Didn’t stop Stuxnet.

It’s interesting what you can do with USB drives.

And more power plants means more possibilities for human errors.

Also it isn't as bad as it sounds. They had to throttle some nuclear power plants slightly. This lead to a loss of less than 0.2% of the total 2022 nuclear generation in france.

> Product Manager on Google Cloud Platform.

The financial cost is at $180 billion US. That seems large.

On Earth, solar allows high energy use before we run into limits from direct thermal pollution, since it uses energy already hitting the planet rather than introducing new energy.

In space, the energy available from sunlight vastly exceeds any available from fusion, and the feasibility difference tilts even more toward solar.

For mobility in space, beamed power will be best, and solar works with that just fine, even out to interstellar distances.

Given that France's builds in both Finland and France itself have been similarly disastrous as the US builds, I don't think the NRC seems to be the likely cause. And France is much better at building big things than the US is, their infrastructure costs are a fraction of US costs. IMHO there's something deeper to the lack of success of nuclear as a technology. It's a mainframe trying to compete in the cloud era.

There even are efforts to recycle existing ones: https://www.offshorewind.biz/2023/02/08/newly-discovered-che...

In most advanced nations landfilling them is prohibited, and many are now burnt in cement kilns.

The US produces hundreds of millions of tons of construction and demolition waste per year.

no, these are included in the calculations of "deaths per kilowatt-hour"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

No it's not unsolved. There are burial sites. The spent fuel is kept on the power plant for years so it cools down.

Also even without nuclear power, there would still be nuclear waste to take care of because of the medical, defence, research, and other industries.

Nope, it's all included, how could it not be?

> Nuclear power rarely kills anyone, but when (not if) things go wrong, it tends to create a massive mess which costs billions to clean up

Yep, yet it's still the safest, which means your argument has to be wrong.

Just to show you the magnitude of your error, the Fukushima accident was directly caused by a tsunami which killed 20,000 people. But your main concern from that event is the cost of cleanup of radioactive material.

More people die from falling off roofs while installing solar panels than from nuclear accidents.

> but if you want to convince people of its safety you probably shouldn't be mentioning its historical record.

Well you're not technically wrong. As you've inadvertently demonstrated with your irrational arguments, since people didn't use reason to arrive at their conclusions, they would not be likely to be persuaded by it.

> Only if you completely ignore the huge amount of pollution and waste generated by mining, reprocessing, and disposal.

Do you mean to say the waste is significantly worse than for solar panels, wind turbines, etc.?

> Again, I personally don't believe this has to be a dealbreaker, but the waste generated by the nuclear industry is still an unsolved problem.

Inert solid waste sitting in a barrel somewhere is not a problem that is worth talking about.

Again, the magnitude of your error is outstanding. We've been simply releasing all the, radioactive mind you, products of burning coal into the atmosphere for the past few hundreds of years but you're concerned about a tiny amount of solid waste.

> > If we (the West) had built out nuclear to satisfy our electricity needs

>

> We did. France hit 80% nuclear, for example.

You cherry-picked the single country with the biggest share of nuclear by far.

> > implementing new nuclear power tech as it improved

>

> We did. It made the plants too expensive to be commercially viable.

Ironically, that's because the standards for nuclear plant safety are determined by the sort of irrational thinking you're presenting here.

> Taking all costs into account, nuclear is currently the most expensive form of generating electricity.

And that's where the issue is buried, I don't believe you're taking all costs into account.

Is coal really cheaper when you include the health and environmental damage it creates? It literally can't be, the costs of human created climate change will be eye-watering.

Are renewables really cheaper once you consider the end goal of a 90%+ renewable grid? The costs of accounting for the inherent intermittency of solar and wind go up exponentially as you increase the share of renewables in the grid.

Adding the first 10% of renewables is trivial, you need no extra storage since the grid itself will simply absorb the difference.

Adding the last 10% is horribly expensive and I don't believe you're accounting for that at all.

Your claim: 50-100 liters per second to cool a 26MW workload.

Actual water consumption, according to Google annual report: 730 liters per second, globally, for an average 3GW load.

The problem as you allude to isn't the technology.

I just don't know if that assumption is true.

Looking at https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/small-modular-reactor...

> The timeline is to finish construction of the first reactor by the end of 2029, and connect it to the grid in 2030.

Sure, let's add 100% buffer because it's a major project, that's between 8-10 years from now. Not bad.

Are we talking about different kinds of reactors maybe?

We still don’t. Australia doesn’t manufacture solar panels, and other than building the wind turbine masts locally, we don’t manufacture wind turbines either.

Refusing to commit to developing a domestic nuclear power industry commits future generations from having that knowledge and skill base.

And I struggle to understand how anyone can, with a straight face, claim nuclear is too expensive, as though more solar and wind is going make retail electricity prices in Australia cheaper.

AU$0.325 per kWh is ridiculous. We export more coal to China than we use locally, and their electricity is cheaper (around half the cost) and dominated by coal, hydro, and nuclear.

CSIRO perfidy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute

which means the storage requirements will be a bit more than you'd think otherwise. You can't get reputable people to quote a price on a whole power grid because of all sorts of uncertainties such as "how many days of outage will people tolerate a year?"

If we use electricity to drive other decarbonization efforts, lets say green steel, or "petrochemical" manufacturing, or sustainable aviation fuels, the grid might become less tolerant of variation rather than more. Use the word "start-up" around a chemical engineer and they're likely to jump out of their skin because starting up a chemical factory is an unprofitable and sometimes dangerous operation. In an oil refinery, for instance, there are systems that produce hydrogen and others that consume it and it reaches a steady state. During startup you may have to make up inputs that aren't available and dispose or store outputs that don't have consumers. There are heat exchangers all over the place to recycle heat but you're going to have to supply steam to some of them and cooling water to others. The system is dynamically stable when it is running but during start-up vulnerable to all sorts of problems, plus people are crawling all over it doing various operations opening up the possibility of human errors such as sucking in storage tanks. In particularly the chemistry used to make jet fuel from syngas or methanol is horribly capital intensive to begin with, increasing that cost 5x by only running the factory 20% of the time takes something that's probably a non-starter to begin with [1]

So far as Voglte a lot of the cost overrun might go away if we just "stayed the course" and built more reactors of the same design. The real sticker cost is probably a bit more than they say it is, but if you could build one bungling free you'd think it could be made for less. It's not just a "western" problem, as the AP1000 is built as a number of "modules" in a factories in China and they waited for years for those factories to figure out how to build the parts and sometimes when they got those parts they were built wrong. If China is succeeding where we are failing it is because they can, politically, raise people's electric bills in the short term in order to dominate an industry in the long term. The main build they are doing now is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One

which is an improved reactor of the kind the French were building back when the French were building large numbers of reactors reliably.

[1] when they really are forced to aviation will probably line up with ground transportation around some single entity fuel like methane or DME

When you say nuclear was never cheap, what are you comparing it to? The impossible to compete with subsidization of coal plants? How can you compete with plants that are allowed to dump toxic radioactive waste into the atmosphere that kills hundreds of thousands annually, but your plants have to go through regulatory hell to prove they're 99.99999999% safe before even being approved?

Detail how nuclear waste is continuously pumped in to the atmosphere. Or shredded and buried like wind turbine blades which are entirely waste with no recycling value.

Hint: it isn’t.

There’s so little of it, it’s still all predominantly stored on site at the power plants.

Highly radioactive reactive waste isn’t highly reactive for very long. And long lasting waste isn’t very reactive at all. Vitrified it’s chemically non-reactive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_canceled_nuclear_react...

That's a lot considering that the US currently has 94 operating power reactors:

https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....

That's not fair.

Chernobyl was a reactor that failed to pass safety tests being put into production. Any failure should be considered expected.

I'm not worried about another Chernobyl. We've had one already, all reactor designs have been tested over and over again to avoid a repeat. The real risk is in all the small and seemingly insignificant things working together in unexpected ways. There will always be a nonzero chance of an incident, and due to the nature of nuclear reactors the impact of an incident is essentially unlimited.

Think of it like commercial airliners. Are they safe? Yes, absolutely. They are the safest method of travel available. I have zero worry about my safety when stepping on an airplane. But despite the tiny odds airplanes do crash from time to time, simply because there are so many of them.

An airplane crash has a smouldering crater and a few hundred dead as its result. Not great, but not terrible either: as a society we build a monument and move on. Would we still be flying airplanes if - no matter how unlikely - a crash meant that an entire city would become uninhabitable?

Edit: this should be Cats cause ~10,000x more bird deaths than collisions with wind turbines.

The same was said of Fukushima. And it was - until a tsunami fried all the backup local power keeping the control systems alive. Turns out the "passive cooling" still requires some valves to be controllable...

So it sounds like the view point of "deal with it when it happens then" and that's what puts me off nuclear.

Nuclear is too unstable when something does occur to be contained and as to when dismantled.

Because of nuclear.

By comparison, Germany dropped its nuclear power industry in favor of focus on renewables. Now they import electricity generated by nuclear from France and buy fossil fuels from Russia despite recent Russian aggression.

Who isn't dependent on fossil fuel imports from Russia? France. Who is looking to ban all internal combustion engines from their largest city by 2030? France.

Because of nuclear.

> Residents of Andorra and parts of France bordering Spain were also reporting being hit by the blackout.

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/28/spain-portugal...

How many nuclear electricity states are there? 30

How many nuclear weapons states are there? 9

What headaches are those nine nuclear capable states providing, exactly?

How has the world been made worse by having nine nuclear capable states? Practically, not just hypothetical anxieties about an unrealised future.

The relevant regulation here is the state-backed guarantees on returns for pge under authority of CPUC. CPUC approves basically any rate increases pge approves. It doesn't need to do this. It could hold pge accountable based on what they determine qualifies as operating expenses vs. infrastructure improvements. PGE wants everything to count as infrastructure improvement because they're guaranteed a rate of return on infrastructure projects.

Obviously it's difficult to determine what "infrastructure improvements" were actually due to poor management and maintenance vs. what infrastructure improvements are required purely to meet demand (for example) or from "normal wear and tear".

It's hard to reconcile 1) the fact that there's pretty broad consensus that PGE fucked up and didn't fulfill its obligations, especially maintenance and 2) reporting record profits. Clearly there's something wrong with the system, particularly the CPUC-utility relationship. AKA, regulation.

https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost...

just mashes together a PV array with about an hour of storage and quotes a price for that which is low and is certainly not going to get you through the night.

So many things drive me nuts about that report and the discourse around it that, I think, contribute to people talking past each other. For instance, quoting one price for solar energy is nonsensical when the same solar panel is going to give much more energy in Arizona than it is in upstate New York. The cost of a solar + battery system is going to be different in different places. In upstate NY we deal with a lot of retailers that are based in places like Bentonville, AK who just can't believe you might need an electric space heater in late April or otherwise your chickens might die. Since 95% of the world's population lives in a milder climate it's no wonder our needs don't get taken seriously.

The intermittency problem involves: (1) diurnal variation (overnight), (2) seasonal variation (do you overbuild solar panels 3x so you have enough generation in the winter or do you invest in very long term storage?) and (3) Dunkelflaute conditions when you are unlucky and get a few bad weeks of weather.

I've seen analyses of the cost of a grid that consider just smoothing out one day, but not one that covers seasonal variation. (So much of it comes down to: "how many days of blackout a year can people tolerate?")

With a significant overbuild or weeks worth of storage capacity costs are not going to be so favorable against nuclear energy. The overbuild offers the possibility that you could do something useful with the extra power but it is easier said than done because "free" power from renewables is like a free puppy. You have to build power lines to transmit it, or batteries to store it, or you have to feed it into some machine whose capital costs are low enough that you're not going to worry about the economics of only running it 20% of the time. (Go tell a Chemical Engineer about your plan to run a chemical factory 20% of the time and that's probably the last time you'll hear from them.)

Today they are wholly unable to build new nuclear power as evidenced by Flamanville 3 being 7x over budget and 13 years late on a 5 year construction schedule.

Their EPR2 program is also in absolute shambles continually being pushed into the future while revising up the costs.

Now hopefully targeting investment decision in mid 2026 and the first new reactor online by 2038.

Until 2038 we should of course stop decarbonizing. No point reducing the area under the curve.

It was impressive, but it's been overshadowed by modern renewables.

In France about 60% of final energy is produced thanks to fossil fuel.

Moreover the cost of this 'nuclearization' was huge (France debt is abyssal, and taxes are very high)

Details: https://sites.google.com/view/electricitedefrance/messmer-pl...

Roof top solar is great for people with spare cash to optimise heir future cash flow.

I advocate for nuclear because it guarantees the poor won’t freeze in the dark.

As the statista.com report says >...Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential buildings and nuclear power have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs of energy generation in the United States. If it wasn't for federal and state subsidies, rooftop solar PV would come with a price tag between 122 and 284 U.S. dollars per megawatt-hour.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/493797/estimated-leveliz...

> And who cares about carbon emissions, China and India have that covered - I don’t need to worry about producing more or less CO2 emissions because it won’t make any difference whether or not I believe in catastrophic climate change.

That doesn't change the US's contribution, the ability of the US to form successful international agreements, and the influence of the US pulling its weight as a much wealthier country than China or India.

Blaming your neighbor for your bad behavior - I sell drugs off my porch because my neighbor does - doesn't make you less criminal. Also unacceptable, from moral and practical perspectives, is saying 'there's nothing I can do'. It's time we stop letting that pass.

At old NREL prices that would be $4.3B for the solar, and $7.4B for the storage, but the lifetimes don't match up with nuclear either. You'd need to replace the storage after 15-20 years, and the solar after 30 years, if the nuclear plant is going to get a lifetime extension to 50 or 60 years. But 15 years from now, prices for batteries and solar will be far far far lower, we just have no clue how much.

To remove the need for power lines, you also need batteries, and enough solar to make it through winter.

In 2024 we, as in globally, completed about 5 GW of new built nuclear.

Let’s compare to renewables:

- 600 GW solar PV added [1]

- 117 GW wind power [2]

- ~100 GW battery storage

Even when adjusting for TWh the disparity is absolutely enormous. We’re talking a ~50x differences and it is only getting larger as renewables continue to scale.

But somehow the only technology which is ”scalable” is new built nuclear power.

[1]: https://www.solarpowereurope.org/press-releases/new-report-w...

[2]: https://www.gwec.net/gwec-news/wind-industry-installs-record...

People overlook how long nuclear takes to build. Hinkley Point C is approaching a decade.

Why do you think that is? Somehow I'm not convinced its the activism holding nuclear back.

Greenpeace spent years campaigning against dumping waste at sea.

In a reasonably free market, which doesn't exist for electricity, solar would win handily.. but this is after decades of subsidized development and incremental improvement by Chinese wafer factories.

I have said it before, but in order for me to believe the claims that renewables and storage are delivering in places like europe, you first have to stop investing and building new natural gas power plants. Rather than classify natural gas as "green", as Germany pushed through in EU, we should have laws to prevent new natural gas power plants from being built and existing fleet should be slowly dismantled. If renewables and storage can deliver on the ”too cheap to meter” promise, they should do so in an environment without natural gas being used behind the scene.

*Yes, I understand it's inflation adjusted. There are so many possible explanations for the observed negative curve that go beyond the bold, broad claim that learning curve theory doesn't hold in nuclear.

In my mind, an (at least) equally reasonable explanation is that the conditions for the learning curve weren't met. (This probably sounds like "no true Scotsman". I admit that the learning curve is a function of scale and relative to mass-production examples, the "signal" for the learning curve is probably weaker to begin with given how many facilities of the same design were actually built.)

-Changes in design pull you backward on the curve. There were lots of changes in French design

-Unsteady expansion timeline messes with the workforce expertise part of the hypothesis. You want ideally an accelerated or at least constant build rate, not large gaps where the workforce either respecializes in another field or retires.

- regulations increase over time. Part of the conditions for the theory are implicitly "all else being equal".

-while inflation adjustment partially accounts for this, labor becomes more expensive as gdp per capital increases (see, for example, low skill manufacturing leaving China as it becomes wealthier). I don't know the details, but given the rapid post-war growth, I'm guessing gdp/capital was growing pretty quickly during the French build out

For relatively low volume manufacturing, the learning curve effects are probably smaller to begin with, so it's easier to get an effective negative learning rate. With so many confounding factors that violate the premise of theory, I find it rather unscientific to definitively claim the theory is just wrong in an entire industry.

storage for 12 hours and we are 80% there. If you don't like 80% solutions then please don't participate in society as it's only working on those.

Here BESS for $63/kWh installed and serviced for 20 years.

https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/15/chinas-cgn-new-energy-an...

https://www.ess-news.com/2024/12/09/powerchina-receives-bids...

China installed 74 GW comprising 168 GWh in 2024. In increase of 250% compared to 2023.

https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/23/chinas-new-energy-storag...

After hitting a plateau storage is now unlocking massive reductions in fossil gas usage in California:

- Gas is down 45% v '23 and 25% v '24

- Batteries up 198% v '23 and 73.4% v '24

https://bsky.app/profile/mzjacobson.bsky.social/post/3lnw3hs...

In the US in 2025 storage was expected to make up 30% of all grid additions. Before Trump came with his sledgehammer of insanity.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586

No one generally expects more than a couple of hours of storage to be needed. But for the fun exercise let’s calculate what spending Vogtles $36.8B on equivalent renewables, as in TWh delivered, and the storage gives.

That makes the renewables come out to about $9B.

With storage costing $0.063B GWh and having $28B to spend we can build 444 GWh storage.

That is the equivalent to running Vogtles two new reactors for 10 days straight.

In this calculation we don’t even bother with Vogtles O&M costs compared to near zero for renewables and storage.

Do you now understand how incredibly expensive new built western nuclear power is?

For example, nuclear takes days to start from cold and is really only economic if operating at a constant output. Thus you need complimentary sources to help meet changes in demand. These days, typically this means gas turbines.

Whether your grid has nuclear or renewables, it will also have natural gas capacity.

Crime increases were across the country, regardless of the politics of the prosecutor. They are believed to be tied to the pandemic. In places where progressive DAs remain, crime has subsequently decreased to historic lows - just like the rest of the country.

No, that isn't the easiest way.

The easiest — not best, easiest — way to produce massive amounts of hydrogen is whatever your electrical power source is plus some low corrosion rods in a river.

If you want the cheapest, well, in most cases PV is the cheapest source of electricity — there's variance, sometimes it's wind.

Nuclear is so expensive that it's the same range of prices as PV plus batteries. And when you're using the electricity to make hydrogen, with the hydrogen as the storage system, batteries are redundant.

Also, even in a Fallout Future where everything is nuclear powered, hydrogen is still needed! Some 6% of today's global natural gas consumption goes to making hydrogen, and a good chunk of that is for ammonia synthesis, which is necessary to feed eight billion people.

Let’s look at the area under the curve?

You know, we need to decarbonize agriculture, construction, transportation etc. as well.

Let look at what the UK has done:

- Coal has gone from 150 TWh to zero.

- Fossil gas from 175 TWh to 85 TWh.

- Nuclear from 80 TWh to 40 TWh.

Would you say this reduction in fossil fuel usage is insignificant because they obviously aren’t done yet?

It took a massive earthquake and tsunami to cause this, and the number of deaths/injuries due to the power plant is a rounding error compared to the earthquake and tsunami. Fukushima actually did most things right with the notable exception of not putting the backup generators on the roof. Had they put the generators on the roof, neither of us would have ever known the name "Fukushima".

When evaluating the Fukushima exclusion zone, compare it to the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989. In that case, we still haven't cleaned up all the oil, and up to 450 miles from the initial spill. By comparison you want to transition to ammonia as a fuel source, which you correctly note is easier to store long term than molecular hydrogen and far more energy dense. Sounds like a good deal since molecular nitrogen is incredibly abundant as well.

Now I want you to imagine there's an ammonia spill in the magnitude of Exxon Valdez. Long term, the ammonia would almost certainly dissipate faster than crude oil, but the immediate acute toxicity would be far worse. You're killing basically all sea life in the area, the fumes would take out most birds and even quite a few people. If the spill were on land, it could severely compromise the ability to grow crops in the region for a long time. And that's not in the face of a massive earthquake and tsunami, but inattentiveness on the part of a single ship's crew.

The point being that large scale energy production and storage will NEVER be fuzzy and completely safe. The most common metric is deaths per unit of electricity. If a power source is small, even one death can be unforgivable. For massive amounts of power, statistics matter.

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Note that the nuclear stats include both Chernobyl and Fukushima. This is notable since Chernobyl was a worst case scenario with a flawed design that has never existed in Western commercial reactors precisely because it was so unacceptably dangerous: no containment vessel, graphite moderation, graphite fuel rod tips, lack of education for its staff, a culture of secrecy, etc.

In the meantime, nuclear has provided obscenely large amounts of electricity since its inception. I'm all for expanding solar and wind, but folks really need to understand the real enemy is fossil fuels: coal, oil, natural gas, etc. The single largest threat to our survival as a species isn't a multi-kilometer exclusion zone but a CO2-laden atmosphere that makes the entire equatorial zone uninhabitable, and that's precisely what we're looking at within a century.

The faster we can move off carbon-based fuels by any means necessary, the better. That includes nuclear. Excluding nuclear from the conversation out of hand is lunacy.

> hydrogen > contributes less than a rounding error to global electricity generation

True, however it doesn't imply that it will remain irrelevant.

> unviable financially

For the time being, and less and less. Bloomberg NEF predicts that green hydrogen will cost approximately 1.2€/kg in 2050. Carbon taxes or oil prices may also play a role as nearly all hydrogen is now produced thanks to some fossil fuel.

> nuclear > is a genuinely low-carbon source of electricity

Green hydrogen could also be.

> prone to leakage

This is a major challenge for transportation-related usages, especially in small or not-intensively used vehicles. This isn't in the "gridpower backup" role, as mass and volume of storage isn't a major parameter.

Edward Teller famously warned about this is a nuclear industry trade publication in 1967.

The only fast reactors I'd trust would be ones with fuel dissolved in molten salt; it's hard to see how that could become concentrated in an accident that doesn't boil the salt. But such reactors have their own problems, in particular exposure of reactor structures to intense fast neutron fluxes (not as bad as in fusion reactors, but worse than LWRs.)

Those are NOT the safety arguments used within the industry. For example in a molten salt reactor, the fuel is already melted! If it gets too hot, thermal expansion moves the radioactive isotopes further away from one another, reducing reactivity. If heat increases past a certain point, plugs at the bottom of the tanks will melt, allowing gravity to dump the fuel into multiple separated storage vessels sized to prevent further activity.

You do not know what you're talking about. You've read a bunch of fear mongering, and bought it. Do you really believe the entire industry of nuclear engineers and support staff are just blindly YOLOing their way through their jobs, damn the consequences?

I swear, you sound like the power production equivalent of antivaxers convinced the medical industry is trying to poison all of us.

"Passive safety" doesn't mean "stuff shouldn't go wrong."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety

It means "we're actively exploring everything that could go wrong and having the worst case scenarios fail to a safe state without requiring human intervention."

Those two positions couldn't be further apart.

All the analyses I've seen for fast reactor safety are about avoiding fuel melting, not what happens if the fuel does melt. The variability in this latter scenario is so great that conclusive analysis ruling out disaster doesn't seem possible. Maybe you could explain the unexpected principle that enables one to do that? Or, lacking that, point me to a paper where such analysis has been performed.