Oh yeah, I would never want my support of nuclear energy to be misconstrued as approving of corner cutting. The return on investment of nuclear energy takes like a decade, because the plants CANNOT be cutting any corners, and cost so much to properly design, build, and commission.

If anything, I would expect the greediest, most irresponsible corporations to be lobbying for more fossil fuel burning, which is actually orders of magnitude more dangerous than nuclear. It's just that the victims of fossil fuels are spread out over millions of cases over decades instead of 1 big headline-grabbing accident every few years, most of which results in little/no deaths (Chernobyl NPP being the obvious exception). For example, Fukushima had 1 casualty, and that was a pretty major incident.

The issue can often be detection as well. Our blowdown line (the line that pumps non-radioactive water from our cooling lake which we use as a dilution source for our liquid releases) releases ~25,000 gpm through a 4 foot wide concrete pipe. We release at most 20 gpm of heavily diluted waste water into this 25k gpm which then further dilutes in the river we make up/letdown to which has flows between 450,000 to 9,000,000 gpm.

The problem is detecting a 1-2 gpm leak through the pipe into the ground when you're pumping tens of thousands of gallons per minute.

Where are you hearing that they cut corners? Nuke plants are extremely expensive and are built by experts.