The actual answer is that we did improve on nuclear safety, and that all the regulations required to - for example - make sure that power plant designers didn't

The actual answer is that we did improve on nuclear safety, and that all the regulations required to - for example - make sure that power plant designers didn't route all the redundant monitoring and control wiring down the same cableways and stuff them full of highly flammable foam are part of the reason nuclear power has become increasingly unaffordable. This is not some hypothetical example I'm making up, nuclear power plants in the US really did do that with predictable results and apparently the fire safety regulations really are a major cost. The Trump administration tried to fix this by giving more flexibility to designers, but of course that just made it proportionally harder to show the designs were safe and achieved nothing. Because of this, one common refrain from nuclear proponents on HN is that we should just get rid of all those safety regulations and go back to 70s-era levels of nuclear safety because it's safe enough, which would be like if we'd just accepted planes were unsafe back when accidents were more common and not tried to fix it. It also misses one of the key lessons of airplane safety: this kind of normalization of deviance is a major cause of serious accidents. For every major disaster, there is a chain of less serious incidents where things just didn't happen to align right to cause lots of deaths, until one day they did... and nuclear power has the potential for some really impressive disasters. It also probably wouldn't be enough to make nuclear power viable again; it has a lot of cost problems.