"Apocalyptic" Fukushima Fuel Rod Removal Begins Nov. 8; TEPCO Subcontracts Yakuza gangsters

[Benton D Struckcheon]

27. What Divernan posted up above about the ever escalating cost of keeping nuclear safe...

…is the problem in a nicely encapsulated nutshell. What the public needs to understand, not just intellectually, but emotionally, in their bones, is that this is a risk that is by its nature unlimited and unmeasurable.
Taleb's Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness are both excellent expositions on that type of risk. (A little realized and known thing, by the way: Keynes was a statistics geek and understood unlimited risk; it was at the heart of his General Theory, something Taleb doesn't understand, but Hyman Minsky does. Or did, in his case.)
The financial system is subject to this because the risks can come from anything, and finance companies are, as a necessity of the business they're in, highly leveraged and therefore subject to fatality at any time. That's the reason you want them as small as possible, so that the failure of any one of them doesn't put the entire financial system at risk.
With nuclear plants, the problem is the failure of any one of them poses a huge risk; every nuclear plant is the equivalent, in risk terms, of a too big to fail bank. You can't limit the risk by making them smaller or anything like that; the only way to mitigate the risk is to eliminate them entirely. I understand that this will mean releasing epically larger amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, but that just makes that problem, which is at least a known and measurable risk, even more important to tackle in every possible way.