Considering that 25,000 some odd were killed by the tsunami and earthquake, and that several nuclear workers got enough exposure to match eating one more banana in a year, I don’t think the Japanese think they need more regulations for nukes. Of course if you were selling regulated tsunamis, you would get some agreement.
Just guessing that like me, you donmeaker, have seen “scholarly” position papers like the this from people with exotic names, like Amory, before. One doesn't need to know much about nuclear power or technology to recognize the activist at work.
Of course nuclear plants cost more. It took 15 years from granting of a first phase site license to generate any power from Seabrook in New Hampshire. During those fifteen years (more or less - probably more), New Hampshire taxpayers and private investors were servicing the debt on the loan. The original utility became insolvent and another consortium picked up the loans, which cost New Hampshire residents as they now pay another utility to purchase the electricity they once owned part of. For fifteen years lawyers, working for the US Govt. for Natural Resources Defense Council's legal corporation, and for the utility owners, were being very well paid. Nothing significant was changed by the lawsuits. Seabrook, right on the Atlantic Ocean, has run at around 95% of capacity for almost forty years, and significantly increased the fish population in the bay near the reactor (which already had great fishing, was and is a great place to go for dinner).
The author, clearly not an environmentalist, doesn't mention that no commercial reactor has ever contributed to “greenhouse” gases, or air pollution. She didn't note, as you did, that there has never been so safe an energy technology, or that no one was hurt at Three Mile Island or Fukushima. Thousands were killed in one hydro damn failure, over a thousand when a liquid natural gas shipping facility blew up in Louisiana, and thousands have died falling off of roofs as they tried to fix the leaks caused by plumbing penetrating their residential roofs, or fix their own solar collectors, whether electric or for pre-heating water. Even if nuclear weren't as economically attractive as coal, a small premium for not having to dispose of one train cars of slag for each 1000 Megawatt plant each day, would be well woth it. Ask those who live in Bejing how they feel about living in a soot cloud for hundreds of days each year.
She also ignores the enormous number of reactors, three of which are already on line, planned for construction in China, which has mostly coal, and terrible problems with air pollution. The plan, announced ith 2007, was for 125 new reactors by 2025 (it may have been earlier, but the target will have been dependent upon the economy, which is very much tied to efficient manufacturing). The first three plants are at full power, and were a variant of the original Westinghouse Nuclear design, since sold to Toshiba. The US couldn't manufacture a pressure vessel today, but could buy one from China or Japan, and perhaps Russia.
John Holdren, our presidential science adviser and well known contributor to Ramparts, the premier Marxist journal of the 70s and 80s, and his acolyte, Amory Lovins, both beholden to E.F. Shumacher, and to “Population Bomb” Ehrlich, could have written the article. Perhaps they collaborated? Holdren taught at UC Berkeley before Therea Kerry brought him to the throne-room at Harvard's Kennedy School. Holdren brought the glib Lovins to help him execute the Obama plan.
Don't bother with the numbers. It used to be sport to show how propaganda is constructed and from what nonsense numbers are cited so that the naive will assume there is substance. After all, there probably are citations. When the perfect safety record and complete lack of air pollution of commercial nuclear technology is ignored, anyone should realize that the time spent taking apart the faulty economic analysis is time wasted. It's like pointing at the reduction in deep water drilling in the Caribbean and claiming oil is subsidized or there would have been more, and claiming that we are therefore running out of it. A nuclear plants pays for its construction cost in a few years (pick a number, say 10 cents/kilowatt hour. What is the gross revenue generated by a million kilowatt plant over 8760 hours?) Government regulators will always find cause to skim more money from the operation. And like all natural resources, Uranium is less expensive now than it was thirty years ago, and there is more of it.
Every University has its activists. Berkeley had Holdren, who brought Lovins on board for a year or two, and John Gofman, who was a darling of the antinuclear activists, though his scientific hypotheses about nuclear health effects were palpable nonesense. The antinuclear activists were also the antiwar activists and the women's rights activists and the pro-abortion actives .... they were professional activists. But Berkeley had Edward Teller and Bruce Aimes and one of the real specialist in thin film solar technology, Marshall Merriam. Holdren never did any science while Merriam and Teller and Aimes were all wonderful scientists. Too bad for George Mason, which also has Walter Williams, who would make a wonderful treasury secretary.