What "disasters" are these that you speak of? In the US, which is the country with the most dysfunctional regulatory requirements on nuclear power, there have been no incidents with commercial nuclear reactors that have caused harm to the general public. The worst US incident, Three Mile Island, caused harm to a fair number of plant workers, but no members of the general public were harmed.

In comparison to the harm done by fossil fuel energy sources, nuclear isn't even in the same ballpark. For example, orders of magnitude more coal miners have been killed or severely injured than nuclear plant workers, even if we normalize by units of energy generated. Plus, if we take into account things like air pollution and its contribution to respiratory illness, there has been significant harm done to the general public by fossil fuels. Yet fossil fuels are regulated much less strictly than nuclear.

> You seem to be arguing some of the added regulations were unnecessary for safety?

I am saying that if we were really concerned about safety, we would have looked objectively at the harms caused by each energy source per unit of energy generated, and regulated them accordingly. That would have meant we would have shifted a large fraction of our base load power generation to nuclear energy decades ago, since per unit of energy generated it causes much less harm than fossil fuels. And when an incident like Three Mile Island happened, instead of panicking and acting like it was a world-shaking disaster, we would have looked objectively at what flaws in the plant design and operation the incident exposed, and fixed them, and gone on with nuclear power.