No; dedication and professionalism are fine. However, paranoia and an inability to communicate and discuss risk are not. The perfect example is point d). I'm clearly making a point in favour of new reactors. I'm precisely saying that reactors are improving and that that's a good thing. Instead you seem to take it as an attack on the nuclear industry. I am sorry, but I wouldn't want you to be the person judging if a new reactor is safe or not.

• a) nuclear plants suffer from neutron damage. Almost any material can be degraded by long term neutron bombardment through neutron capture; this means that over the long term parts of nuclear reactors have failure modes that may not be present in any other power plant

• So? There is nothing new scientifically here, you design for a level of neutron damage and periodically verify your assumptions are correct. And you can always anneal the reactor vessel in place to remove much of the neutron damage and regain operating margins. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annealing_(metallurgy)

• b) nuclear reactor cores are highly radioactive to the level that can even destroy electronic equipment, certainly causes contamination and makes human inspection impossible. This makes it extremely difficult to be sure that equipment degradation has not become serious (compare with aeroplane inspection which uses detailed visual inspection at close range combined with large devices wheeled right up to the plane)

• Complete B.S. Radiation hardened underwater camera systems have been available for 30 years. And there are fiber optic methods available for remote inspection as well.

• c) the parts which are likely to fail (those close to the reactor core) are precisely the ones which really matter and can have worse consequences than the typical failures in a conventional power plant

• More B.S. The most likely parts to fail in a reactor are never in the core. The nuclear industry is well away of which parts are closest to their long term operating margins and which require the most frequent inspection and repair. And the stuff inside the reactor vessel ain't it.

• d) reactor physicists (the same ones that guaranteed us that Fukashima was safe) tell us that the new generations of reactors are much safer than the old ones; hydro power, for example, hasn't really had a massive safety change in the last fifty (or even hundred) years

• Nuclear power is the only industry that is not permitted to improve, it must be perfect from day one. FYI, hydro has killed more people than multiples of all other power generation methods combined. It's not even close. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

• e) nuclear reactors are incredibly complex, difficult and precise mechanisms. They have a huge setup and teardown cost which means that the capital investment is huge, even compared to other large power plants. The more often this is done the more likely that it will go wrong.

• Ehh? High capital costs are from what? High interest rates. Delays in plant construction and operation many times a result of frivilous lawsuits DESIGNED by environmental organizations to intentionally run up costs. Talk about self fulfilling criticisms. The current generation of plants are avoiding this by getting all that crap doen up front and also by self financing. We'll see.

• f) nuclear reactors leave large amounts of radioactive waste during decommissioning; one part of this is the fuel, but probably more important is all of the other parts which become radioactive during the lifetime of the reactor (remember neutron capture). The fewer plants that are decommissioned the lower the volume of this waste.

• This is true, but to put some context on this, the volumes are simply insignificantly small. We have many many many times the volume being buried from nasty municipal waste that have chemicals in it that do not decay away, but thats ok right?

Obviously a), b) and c) push in the opposite direction from d), e) and f). What this means is that basically we should have a smaller number of safer nuclear reactors run for longer by people who we can trust to ensure that a) and b) don't become a problem. Unfortunately people who support nuclear power tend to be in denial about the potential risks and so aren't the right people. I guess it's like politicians. Anybody who wants to be a politician should probably be ruled out from the job / anybody who wants to run a reactor should probably be banned from doing so :-)