Comment by LorenPechtel

Except that's a very bad idea.

In the real world you should not be looking at the risk of X. Rather, you should be looking at where X stands amongst the competing options.

Nuclear power is an extreme example of this going wrong. The US effectively legislated it out of existence by decreeing that reactors should be as safe as reasonably possible. The problem is "reasonably" is fundamentally fluid. In theory at least you can always make things safer by throwing more safety systems at it. And if nuclear power is cheap enough you can afford to throw more safety systems at it. Thus nuclear power is by definition too expensive. And that's before the NIMBYs abuse the regulatory system to drive the costs way up.

Look at the reality: Depending on your yardstick nuclear is either safer than any other large scale power source, or nearly as safe as anything else and far safer than where most of our power comes from.

(The yardstick problem comes down to Fukushima. That's more than half of the "nuclear power" deaths right there--entirely because the politicians messed with things. Listen to the engineers, there would have been an expected death toll of zero. But nuclear power is blamed for the political decisions that killed hundreds.

And the yardstick comes down to a dam failure in China--ascribe the deaths from their hydro power dam failure to hydro and it's out of the running.)

But in the real world natural gas has about 10x the risk of nuclear before looking at climate effects. And oil has about 10x the risk of natural gas, plus a bit more in climate effects (a greater percentage of an oil molecule is carbon.) And coal has about 10x the risk of oil, plus considerably more climate effects.

We don't have the power, civilization (and virtually everyone in it) dies. The plants must run, the question is what runs them. Society would be safest if we took the existing rulebook and threw it in the trash can, replace it with a standard that expects a given risk per terawatt-hour, it's the job of the regulators to devise rules that accomplish this and any company is allowed to present evidence that a different approach is better. (If we focus less on risk X and more on risk Y we can get more safety for less cost.)

That's at least half a million American deaths in the last three decades on the altar of the precautionary principle.