> 1% of commercial reactors Have failed catastrophically.

That seems a bit high to me. There have been a lot of commercial reactors.

> Seems like terrible track record.

Even if true, everything fails sometimes. Rooftop solar has a surprisingly high death rate from people falling off of roofs while installing it.

Ultimately it's a question how safe nuclear is relative to other power methods, probably in terms of deaths per terawatt hour. And even counting those catastrophic failures, it turns out it's actually extremely safe. (...which really underscores just how horribly dangerous some of the alternatives are...)

None of which means nuclear power is economic.

100% of fossil plants fail catastrophically; the catastrophe is just a bit slower.

Statista claims there are 440 nuclear power plants in operation today, and most of them probably have several reactors. So unless you're using some technical meaning of "commercial" that precludes things like Chinese SOE, I think the claim is just false.

No because now we have designs that cannot fail in the same way that 1% did.