Of course they cut corners! They're so overburdened with endless overly cautious regulations that see spending a billion man hours as better than letting a single curie of material get loose into the wider environment (which is incredibly stupid given how much more good a billion man hours can do in, say, healthcare). If they didn't cut corners nothing would get done.
And once corner cutting starts it doesn't distinguish well between the actually important rules and the ineffectual or overly cautious ones. Overregulation is an actual safety threat.
"Of course they're going to be willfully negligent! Just change the rules so they're allowed to kill you and they won't have to break them." While being novel isn't particularly compelling. It also has no explanatory power over all of the corruption and willful negligence pre-1979 or the spiralling costs elsewhere.
We allow people to drive. We allow burning of fossil fuels and use of tires.
These things kill people. Life is not infinitely valuable, a higher quality of life for years can be worth a few life hour reduction in life expectancy.
In the domain of public policy, money is lives. Spending more money on nuclear safety means less money on cancer detection or rare disease research, which costs lives. Spending money inefficiently costs lives.
> It also has no explanatory power over all of the corruption and willful negligence pre-1979 or the spiralling costs elsewhere.
And once corner cutting starts it doesn't distinguish well between the actually important rules and the ineffectual or overly cautious ones. Overregulation is an actual safety threat.