Wish these billionaires with good intentions would invest in marketing to revamp public nuclear sentiment. There’s clearly the possibility of progress given how effective other political campaigns are.

If they really cared they would invest into getting rid of the source of the anti nuclear sentiment: shut down obsolete power plants with unsafe designs. Fukushima and Chernobyl happened because everyone ignored this simple advice. Nuclear power plants are so capital intensive that operators keep plants with known design defects or gross mismanagement running.

If most billionaires are optimizing for social image / good will, your idea makes no sense to most of those people.

On inspection, if they are optimising for social image / good will then a marketing campaign is the obvious starting point.

Their money can market both that nuclear is safe and they’re to be trusted. Plenty of oxygen for both.

Do you really believe that a billionaire clearly funding a marketing campaign for themselves would be received well?

Charity often does good, but often does not have the intended or apparent result. See William Easterly on the subject.

Is the asymmetric risk really any worse than hydro-electric, though? The Banquiao Dam failure killed something like an order of magnitude more people than Chernobyl. And there was the recent Oroville Dam incident which didn't kill anyone but it came pretty close to failing catastrophically.

> Is the asymmetric risk really any worse than hydro-electric, though?

Yes.

You are only looking at the immediate damage. After the dust settles, with a worst-case nuclear accident you have a heavily contaminated area which cannot be resettled for a long time; after a worst-case hydroelectric accident, you have mostly only water and mud, and can start rebuilding almost immediately.

>a heavily contaminated area which cannot be resettled for a long time

That's only with modern risk-avoiding-at-all-costs safety standards. The initial plans for handling Chernobyl, the worst fallout nuclear incident, was to cleanup - which they did - and resettle soon afterward the cleaned up area - which they did not. And now we have that useless extended exclusion zone - a monument to giving in to our fears.

Those plans were made before the incident by medical physicists. They were then modified by the party to suit political realities on the ground. Even the authoritarian URSS knew how far it could push people.

Is there an accepted methodology for calculating risk estimations in these situations? I mean, it's essentially speculation afaict, so how do you put a number on it?

I suspect there's some relevant work in the financial sector, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taleb_distribution