They all have issues, production "greeness" being a big one ie how much CO2 do you produce making the things and how much footprint do place on the enviroment using them per Unit of energy produced. And also how much it would cost to get the energy where it is required and how much transmission drop do you get.
The nuclear regulation is a different beast to what it was 20 years ago or even 50 when the current generation of Nukes were being designed.
The engineers and operators really did take the piss in the past mainly because they were mostly goverment and could also use the national defense excuse. In someways the issues we have today are mainly legacy issues due to this piss taking. There was also alot of none engineers with technical input. Its always an issue if the highly intelligent physics boys don't get some one with a bit of common sense making sure they don't do something daft in the name of science.
There are rather large tracks of land in the US and russia which are basically off limits to humans for a very long time due to enriching and processing contamination. In the UK we also have our issues in various installations and sites which all date back to the same period of lack of regulation or simply ignoring what regulation there was purely for military/national security excuses.
As for Scotland and Nuclear. To be honest I think we have 4 online at the moment which produce over 50% of our energy Torness and Hunterston B has two . But we do export something like 20-25% of total production onto the national grid. The nuclear share is slightly screwed because its a really bad idea to vary the energy production rate in these things so they tend to leave it set and other sources which are more responsive get varied for consumption load.
The current plan of doing away with them is a bit far fetched to be honest. I wouldn't say an expansion in the number of sites is required just a replacement of the ones we have have on the current sites in the borders with modern reactors which can't breed. They can look after GLA and EDI and can export south and the rest of the hydro etc can do the rest of scotland. This next batch of reactors your looking at a 100 years operating by which point hopefully Fusion should be up and running.
O and this is the site for nuclear incidents in the UK.
Quarterly statement of nuclear incidents at nuclear install....
Also as well you wouldn't believe how **** the material properties were of the metal that were used in the magnox era of reactor production. Especially the American steel. I tried to get some metal for test pieces for some cracking issues and you just couldn't get it with such low UTS or plastic yield point. Speaking to the steel production guys they said they couldn't even make it that poor these days with the current plant in Europe and Japan. The worst stuff you could get was from the US old stock from 20 years ago. But even that was 10-20% better than what was used.
The first source of metal provided samples when I asked for them for the grade used and when tested it out performed the metal used by 165%. It was then I realised it didn't matter what grade you ordered you actually got the "best" stuff but with a different cert with a lower grade on it. All prefectly legal as it was better than the required grade but utterly useless for what I wanted.
The reactors are loaded with tensile and impact test pieces when they are built before going critical. Then every so often test pieces are pulled out and tested to get the current state of the material properties of the metal in the reactor. It changes over time and flux exposure due to neutron creep and hardening. Its one of the reasons why some reactors are now limited to 60-70% output.