[quote=@Dinh AaronMk]
<Snipped quote by Vilageidiotx>

Chernobyl and Fukushima were what he was referring to, or so I imagine. He didn't say "three" so I imagine Three Mile Island was ignored.

But the lessons from either are pretty easy to determine. One is to not be Soviet and the other isn't to build on fault-lines or in range of tsunamis. Both are pretty easy to not do all-in-all and we're unlikely to have a disaster as major as Chernobyl in the future, which was much more a result of faulty bureaucratic practices than the sloppy engineering of the reactor at the time.

Of particular fun note of Chernobyl is that every engineer in the room was strongly against running the test that melted the reactor down at that time, but the lead engineer in the room at the time wanted to cut corners to get it down. Then wanted to cut additional corners as the disaster progressed in a vein attempt to save his face so he can have the part promotion he was promised that year. It was in the Soviet case a severe lack of oversight that also exposed a severe fault in Soviet nuclear design that they would have otherwise denied until something else happened.
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But that's what I am saying though. If we were to fall back on nuclear power to a larger degree, wouldn't that sort of thing become more common? It just comes off to me a bit like being the guy in 1900 talking about the first car accident and saying "Hey, these guys wrecked their cars because they were being stupid and it was raining and its a new thing, people will wise up and this won't be common in the future." 

You can't underestimate the ability of people to fuck up. It's just something that happens. And the main concern is that, if we were to quadruple the number of nuclear facilities, we'd see more of these fuck ups. We don't want to take what happened in Chernobyl and say "Well, for that to happen you have to have Soviet Bureaucracy", because that seems like false-empiricism, like saying "It has to be 1986, and Mikhail Gorbachev has to be in power, and you have to be somewhere in the Ukraine." Then we move to Fukushima and the situation is different, so we add a new list of requirements. That doesn't tell me we know all the ways these things can be fucked up, it tells me were are discovering the ways we can fuck up by having them happen. And I think this is too broad a disaster to play with it too lightly.