Some key points:
- nuclear causes fewer deaths, both animal and human alike
- nuclear takes up far less space, and therefore destroys far less of the environment compared to solar farms, hydro, or wind farms
- nuclear is stable and not an intermittent source, no issues with grid storage, unlike renewables, which currently solve this with fossil peaker plants
- nuclear is hard to turn off so to meet fluctuating demand solely on it, you’d need an excess of nuclear, which is a waste
- nuclear excess could encourage other use of electricity, such as electric heating or transport, however
- nuclear when it does go bad, goes really bad, mostly in that a large area has to be abandoned for a long long time (historically still fewer deaths than renewables per unit of energy produced tho)
- nuclear can cause the proliferation of nuclear weapons
- nuclear is a lot harder to spin up, requires extensive education and is hard and takes a long time to build a plant, compared to renewables
- all that nuclear waste and no plan other than shove it in somewhere, in a mountain, and keep it secret, keep it safe.
Yay or Nay?
What say you?
Oh, agreed, personally. There’s room for all these technologies, and sometimes even a necessity for only some of them, due to a lack of proper alternatives in some places. And it’s not always the same technology. There’s no one size fits all answer, for every place on Earth.
This is a debate worth having only in a specific localized context, and not to find some generalized rule imo. I never understood why it had to be either/or.