Regulation
There is an idea that regulation is a bad thing. The government should let business alone, let them do what they need to do to make profits. This will benefit all of us.
There are others who disagree. Coal , the other fossil fuel, has a long history of bloodshed between workers and management. The story linked here is about methane detectors turned off, so that coal can continue to come out of the ground. In one special incident: Don Blankenship, the CEO of Massey Energy, was caught with a 2006 memo that told workers faced with safety rules, “you need to ignore them and run coal” because “coal pays the bills.”
In other news, BP has sort of fitted a cap on the mile deep gusher, just in time for hurricane season. There is no way of knowing how that story will turn out. And more stories are coming out about how workers on the deepwater horizon could see the problems, but kept silent. They wanted to keep their jobs. A key quote from the story linked: “But don’t lose the view of the big picture. Big business is there to make as much money as they can for their shareholders. They do not give a rat’s ass if they are sending their workers into harms way as long as the benefits outweigh the costs. And by benefits I mean profits, and by costs I mean lives.”
What if this same attitude was applied to nuclear power?
Chamblee54 
As in many things, balance is key to good and effective regulation of anything including business. With too little regulation businesses optimize their own short-term interests until the lack of long term focus and controls allow the system to get way out of whack, resulting in extreme volatility and economic disasters. With too much regulation businesses’ profits and innovations may be limited, decreasing the potential for economic improvement and making responses to economic fluctuations longer and harder. All or nothing is not a viable approach when it comes to regulation, though – balance is the only good solution, and calling for relaxed regulations, smaller government, and the like does not help. Standards differ by industry according to risk, which is one reason why the nuclear industry has (reports) fewer serious incidents than the other energy-related industries, but I am sure the same basic principles still apply, and balanced regulation is still the best goal to have a healthy economy.
Thanks for stopping by. This is a complex issue, which my quickie overview does not really do justice.
I was looking for some text to go between the pictures, and to get people to think.