Comment by credit_guy

> who can be relied upon to run these things, who can be trusted to regulate them and the failure modes of accidents.

I personally trust the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I also trust the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, and the regulatory bodies in the UK and the EU.

Why?

The failure modes are not binary. A reactor is not just operating fine or going boom. There are multiple small failures that can happen, and you can get an idea if a country's nuclear fleet is run with safety in mind or not.

Chernobyl happened during a safety exercise, an exercise that was attempted 3 times before and failed 3 times before. In principle the plant should not even have been allowed to operate until the exercise had been completed. The exercise was supposed to demonstrate if in case of reactor emergency shut-down the cooling water can be kept circulating in the core for one minute, the amount of time it took for the Diesel generators to ramp up power; it was an essential exercise to perform before starting full power operations. The fact that the plant was allowed to operate for 3 years without completing this exercise - no, actually, while failing this exercise multiple times, tells you a lot about the safety mentality of the nuclear industry in the Soviet Union.

In the US, the NRC performs a lot of monitoring, and the results are published. For example, here's [1] a dashboard of performance indicators. There are 17, such as: Unplanned Scrams per 7000 Critical Hours, Unplanned Power Changes, Residual Heat Removal System, Reactor Coolant System Leak, etc. Out of about 100 reactors, you can see only green, with the exception of one yellow; that yellow is for the Palisades plant that is not currently operating, it is in the process of restarting operations, and I am sure it will not be allowed to restart until all the performance indicators are green.

[1]https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/oversight/pi-summary