It's effectively impossible to raise the safety standards for coal to anything like nuclear safety standards. What I would like to see is an across-the-board c

It's effectively impossible to raise the safety standards for coal to anything like nuclear safety standards. What I would like to see is an across-the-board change to safety regulation: A technology is deemed safe enough if it's 50% better than the closest *meaningful* competitor. Let's evaluate nuclear by that standard and see what we get: The closest meaningful competitor is natural gas. (Although you could make an argument for considering gas-backed renewables a source. I have never seen safety numbers for such combos.) Natural gas has a death rate of 2.82/Twh--by my proposal nuke would be deemed adequate at 1.41/Twh even if better were possible. Reality: 0.03/Twh. 47x as safe as needed. (And note that the natural gas numbers do not include any global warming related deaths, the real picture is even more out of whack.) (As for coal--it's 6.5x as bad as natural gas, and more global warming to boot.) This is one of these cases where lowering safety standards would actually save lives by making the safer option more attractive. It's why the FAA accepts lap infants on airplanes--they know that a lap infant will fare considerably worse than someone properly strapped in if there's trouble, but said infant is still safer as a lap infant in an airplane than properly strapped in in a car. The lap infant rules shift some people on the edge from driving to flying.