> 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

I more or less agree with your comment but feel it should be pointed out the CSIRO economic feasibility study is specific to Australia.

The arguments made there; why Australia is better to pursue renewables now rather than hope for nuclear eventually have no bearing on, say, China's use of nuclear for 20% of Chinese baseload.

A large part of the CSIRO argument is the greenfield standing start no prior expertise massive upfront costs and long lead time to any possible return.

China, by contrast, has an existing small army of nuclear technologists, multiple already running reactors, and many reactors of varying designs already in the design and construction pipeline.

- Spent fuel is a solved problem, we just store it securely

- Who can be relied upon: who do you rely upon to run your drinking water?

- Failure modes of accidents: have been extensively studied and essentially designed out

- Multiple catastrophic failures: sounds bad until you realize that you can name only two:

1. Chernobyl: old flawed reactor design, basically impossible today, a few unfortunate deaths among first responders in the cleanup, that's it

2. Fukushima: no radiation deaths. You would get a higher dose of radiation flying to Japan to visit Fukushima than from drinking the irradiated leaked water there.

> upwards of $1 trillion if not more.

Where are you getting this number? According to https://cnic.jp/english/?p=6193 it was estimated at JPY 21.5 trillion (roughly USD 150 to 190 billion).

They should focus research on thorium reactors as they are supposedly cleaner than what we have today, and afaik you can actually use the fuel waste again and again, so it drastically reduces the problem of nuclear waste and what to do with it.