alt Hacker NewsNo reactor has yet even reached the operating age of 60 years. That 80 years number is wholly speculative.
We stopped building nuclear reactors in the 1970ies[0] because with the additional complexity to make them safe, the systems were just too expensive.
It has nothing to do with "relentless irrational opposition".
[0] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Nuclear-Reactor-Construct...
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"safe" is a spectrum. While coal is allowed to kill millions of people a year, the safety level of nuclear in the US was raised to "no matter whatever happens no one ever anywhere must have harm come to them" and that's not realistic. Solar kills orders of magnitude more people than nuclear! But we haven't regulated rooftop solar out of existence, plus that wasn't even an option 50 years ago. That's 40 years we didn't have to be poisoning the Earth with coal.
> the systems were just too expensive.
Maybe, but the world is changing. What is safer: some nuclear incidents once in a while, or +4 degrees in the world and a whole strip of land around the equator becoming unlivable to the human species? We're talking billions of refugees here.
I think we need to realise how bad the situation is and how worse it is going to be before we say that nuclear energy is "risky".