The US literally stopped issuing new reactor permits in 1979 (down from on-average about 12 per year), and didn't begin issuing new ones until 2012. Out of 177 reactors issued construction permits up through 1979, at most 112 were ever online at once, in 1991, up from 69 in 1979 when the Three Mile Island failure happened - implying over half of already permitted construction was abandoned or never even started. The facilities under construction were subject to an exponentially increasing gauntlet of new safety assessments, failsafe systems, and in many cases reconstruction of things already built and approved just years prior; eventually, the expense of such facilities radically outstripped the expected ROI of nuclear facilities altogether. Most facilities overran on costs, and took decades longer than expected to see their first real returns, if they even stayed open long enough to see real returns.If US nuclear plants haven't significantly endangered human lives since 1979, it's because the thresholds for accepted risk became so low as to render new enterprise impossible.
Regulating air traffic control (and thus air traffic) into impossibility isn't a realistic option. Unlike nuclear energy, which has functionally equivalent alternatives, there is no functional equivalent to the speed, reach, and cost of air travel. We likely already hit the practical floor on incidents in ATC a long time ago, thanks to (as you have observed) the variables involved being very stable for decades.
Hence the cause for alarm: what if, all of a sudden, those reliable variables are changing?
atleastoptimal|2 years ago