There's been a lot of misleading hype and PR about nuclear industry.
It isn't magic, it's just a very dangerous, difficult, and expensive technology.
We can expect another TMI-scale event, with a 1 in 10 chance of it being a Chernobyl-scale disaster.
According to MIT's "The Future of Nuclear Power":
Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) identifies
possible failures that can occur in the reactor,
e.g., pipe breaks or loss-of-reactor coolant flow,
then traces the sequences of events that follow,
and finally determines the likelihood of their
leading to core damage. PRA includes both
internal events and external events, i.e., natural
disasters. Expert opinion using PRA considers
the best estimate of core damage frequency to
be about 1 in 10,000 reactor-years for nuclear
plants in the United States.
...
Potentially large release of radioactivity from fuel accompanies
core damage. Public health and safety depends
on the ability of the reactor containment to prevent
leakage of radioactivity to the environment. If containment
fails, there would be a large, early release (LER) and
exposure of people for some distance beyond the plant
site boundary,with the amount of exposure depending
on accident severity and weather conditions. The probability
of containment failure, given core damage, is about 0.1.
If those estimates apply to the roughly 440 reactors world-wide,
then we can expect a TMI-scale event roughly every 23 years:
10,000 reactor-years / 440 reactors = 23 years
Chernobyl was 24 years ago ... tick tick tick ...
If they try to keep all those reactors running for another 20 years,
then we can pretty much expect another TMI-scale accident,
with a 1 in 10 chance of it being more a Chernobyl-scale event.
And that's with "normally" operating nuclear power plants.
This is one of the reasons nuclear power was abandoned 30 years ago,
to scale it up to 1,000 reactors in the US and 10,000 globally,
there would have been a TMI-scale accident every year,
and a Chernobyl-scale disaster every decade.
The new Generation 3 designs are supposed to meltdown less frequently,
but serious design flaws have already been discovered.
And the new designs are so expensive, France is thinking of going back to the old designs.
Is China using the same quality control standards that resulted in melamine poisoning of pet food and baby food?