I can think of a couple of of important differences off the bat...

1) spewing oil wells very quickly displace hot oil with cool oil, while a forest fire fuel just sits there, remaining hot

2) burning oil gushers are very compact, while forest fires are generally spread out

as much as

True, but it does matter. Profits flow to headquarters and to the owners, and HQ employees and residents of their locations are affected by that. There are good reasons communities bid against one another to become the locations of corporate headquarters. "Prestige" isn't the only reason.

Sounds about like what kind of boxed-in thinking I'd expect from a bond manager. Maybe he could stretch himself a little and suggest golf carts.

Tesla's success in making very good cars surprised me, given how many failed to build cars in the past. But there's an important difference—most of those who failed were originally from the automaking industry. Looks like having that experience is more of a negative than a positive.

While giving $100M for such a cause sounds great, I would either study the issues or hire someone I trusted to study them and direct my money where it would do the most good.

Rewarding teachers for results is one of those things that sounds good until you start looking at how you're going to measure results. The standardized test craze of this millennium has done far more harm than good, focusing attention on those things easy to measure rather than those that are the most important. Good teachers recognize other good teachers. Students recognize good teachers. Sometimes parents do. But administrators only do if they know what a good teacher is—if they were once a good teacher, and many education administrators were not.

Tire manufacturers in the US resist tires having expiration dates. Why would they mind, since that might increase demand for replacements? Distributors and retailers might mind since it means their inventory loses market value quicker than it would otherwise. Supposedly the manufacturers fear that having an expiration date will imply to consumers that their tires should last until that date. The lifetime might be set at 6 years, which is longer than most tires' tread lasts.

To some degree I'd expect this sort of thinking to apply here.

Pretty much nailed it. In theory, we can build fail-safe reactors, but it wasn't done. It's nearly impossible to overestimate a life-cycle cost for a reactor, given that there'll be many decades of stuff to deal with even after it's shut down. In the US, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission hasn't fulfilled its original mission faithfully. Why would we expect it to do otherwise now? Properly licensed, designed, built, regulated, and inspected reactors are very expensive. Economically, particularly taking into account the uncaptured costs of using nukes and fossil fuels, reducing usage and utilizing renewables just makes sense. Save the nukes for spacecraft, other planets and moons, and submarines, if we must have them.

Here's a thought... Who profits from building reactors? Who profits from operating them? Often not the same entities. If the operators fail to operate them safely, the builders suffer from loss of future jobs. Maybe if the builders retained some say-so over operation, there'd be more safety. Of course, that fails to account for the effect of prioritizing quarterly profits ahead of long-term viability.

Also the LHC.

Rather than bureaucracy, I think it's greed and lack of leadership. When the greedy scrape 50, 75, or 90% off the funds available to build something, that's a problem, but when they take 99% and avoid paying taxes, the populace doesn't want to do it any more. Plus when an elected top dog doesn't appear to be solidly behind something, others don't tend to follow. There's a limit to how many people will work their fingers to nubs not knowing if their project will be funded at all next year.