Who looked into extreme nuclear meltdowns?

Regarding 1., I would value someone who has researched this give more insight into:

A. How long diesel generators could be expected to be supplied with diesel when there is some continental electricity outage of a year (or longer). This is hard to judge. My intuition is that society would be in chaos and that maintaining diesel supplies would be extremely tough to manage.

B. What is minimally required in the long process of shutting down a nuclear power plant? Including but not limited to diesel or other backup generator supplies.

Regarding 2., I do not see how a meltdown as happened with Chernobyl is not thought to be possible with current reactor designs. Even if current reactor designs have more safeguards, the fundamental problem still seems the same. You have constantly heating fissile materials that require cooling water to not overheat. And there are some potentially flammable substances in the area of the (used up) fuel rods too. Could you clarify more specifically what you think are important differences here?

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I felt a little confused about why the summary sounded conspiratorial to you. The way I meant to write it is “a chain of plausible-seeming but neglected events happen, and lead to catastrophe”. At most this seems a story of humans not being incentivised to act to prevent tail risks? Am I missing something?

Now, Bret Weinstein does seem to have a leaning toward potentially falsely identifying conspiracies. While I agree COVID vaccine negative side-effects seem underreported (I’ve seen it with family), I am also skeptical of Bret’s coverage. I also think there is another perspective on the Evergreen College situation, which is that the college had been slow to implement thoughtful reforms (whatever that means) to address structural discrimination and that tensions boiled over.

At the same time, I want to be careful about not dismissing explained reasoning outright because the person seems on the face of it unreasonable. There are people outside EA whom I talked with who initially seemed in some ways very unreasonable, until I probed their perspective enough, found a more comprehensive way of looking at the problem, and surprisingly changed my mind.

Would also want to encourage maintaining some openness around looking for conflicting perspectives. You have been advising a climate strategy of a developing a mix of energy solutions, including nuclear energy. You would adjust your recommendations if you ever found rigorous reasoning for there being an unacceptable risk of nuclear meltdown, right?

But it took "numerous extraordinary actions" to prevent bad stuff from happening with spent fuel at Fukushima-Daiichi until "the alternative cooling system could be installed." (p. 140). Even with additional safeguards, they seem fairly dependent on power to operate active cooling systems. I think it's fair to doubt that similar extraordinary actions could be undertaken and sustained if most of the spent fuel pods in the world were experiencing similar situations during a time that the grid was down across much of the world.

The quotes from the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency’s report were interesting.

moving nuclear fuel stored in pools into dry casket storage The extent to which we can do this is limited because spent fuel must be stored for one to ten years in spent fuel pools while the shorter-lived isotopes decay before it's ready to be moved to dry cask storage.

I did not know this. I added an edit to the post: “nuclear waste already stored in pools for 5 years”.

I don't think an environmental radioisotope release can realistically give people across the world acute radiation syndrome.

Can you cite evidence and/or reasoning? Considering intake of the radioactive isotopes (through skin contact, breathing, and water/food consumption) as well? This feels like the kinda thing where modelling error can happen easily. I share some of your skepticism here, but also am an amateur in this area.