Comparing a bridge or a plane to a nuclear meltdown seems pretty disingenuous. If a plane crashes at an airport that does not prevent the airport from being accessible by humans for 50+ years. If a bridge collapses that does not prevent you from building a new one at that location for 50+ years.
I don't think anything they described applies only to 1st generation plants. They all still hold true today. The thing with coal and fossil fuel power is that there was not enough planning of the entire system. The end result was the production of gases directly into the environment.
If we want to go down the nuclear route we need to design a well oiled closed looped system that can completely handle poking without any easily recoverable problems. There are many ideas in the pipeline such as molten-salt reactors. These take time to test, validate, and integrate into a cohesive system.
The biggest worry for me is shortcuts and penny-saving. How many parts of this system will be skipped do to being "to costly", "not financially feasible", etc...
I made the comparison because you are trusting your life to the government or corporation when you drive over a bridge or fly in a plane. Which is something most people do daily without thinking about it even though the death toll from collapsed bridges and plane crashes far outweighs that of nuclear energy.
Safety of later reactor designs is far improved from the earlier pressurized water reactors, although even those relatively dangerous reactors have been used widely in the navy without incident for decades. There are reactors already in use that are stable to perturbations, TRIGA reactors have negative temperature coefficients which make meltdown type accidents impossible. They are so safe, students are entrusted to operate one at Reed college. I would need to do more research to comment on perturbative stability of later reactor designs in use for power generation.
I share your concerns on the deleterious effects of economic pressure. Although my primary concern is that we will stop building them and decommission existing reactors, citing the high capital cost and cheap nameplate cost of solar.
I don't think anything they described applies only to 1st generation plants. They all still hold true today. The thing with coal and fossil fuel power is that there was not enough planning of the entire system. The end result was the production of gases directly into the environment.
If we want to go down the nuclear route we need to design a well oiled closed looped system that can completely handle poking without any easily recoverable problems. There are many ideas in the pipeline such as molten-salt reactors. These take time to test, validate, and integrate into a cohesive system.
The biggest worry for me is shortcuts and penny-saving. How many parts of this system will be skipped do to being "to costly", "not financially feasible", etc...