This is a bit reductionist, as we're talking about vastly different scales of infrastructure here governed by very different institutions with very different ex

This is a bit reductionist, as we're talking about vastly different scales of infrastructure here governed by very different institutions with very different expectations imposed upon them by the population. From some admittedly quick research, there are apparently 600,000 road bridges in the US, and the continued maintenance of these bridges is dispersed between 50 different state governments. The US 140,000 miles of railroad track that transports 61 tons of goods per American per year. The scale of the size and use of road and rail systems in the United States are off the charts massive. This is not to excuse the issues you're referring to (they are real and they should definitely be fixed), but the context in which these issues are occurring is important when comparing to something like nuclear. And it's not like it's all bad when it comes to massive infrastructure in the US: 1.7 million people fly in the US every day, and the last fatal crash on a commercial airlines occurred in 2009. It's actually kind of mindblowing that flying in the US right now is probably the safest mode of transport.. ever? Clearly the US is capable of regulating _some_ things well from a safety perspective. So.. there are only 92 active nuclear reactors in the United States, all of which are regulated under a single independent agency of the US federal government (the NRC). It's a much smaller, more tractable problem than general transportation infrastructure. The worst accident occurred in 1979 and the total amount of deaths in the US caused by the industry are vanishingly small compared to so many other industries (even if you use the worst estimates from the TMI accident). The regulations and associated costs surrounding nuclear are such that we have fewer reactors now than we had in 1990. And the designs and technology of nuclear reactors continues to be improvements upon (what happened at Chernobyl specifically is basically not possible anywhere in the world besides the Russia). I just don't think it really makes sense to cast into doubt the entirety of the US government's ability to keep people safe at all (including from scary things like nuclear) just because we are seeing _some_ things go wrong at times (and I say this as someone who does in fact have very little faith in the efficacy for the US government generally speaking). Context and historical performance matter.