On top of that the neo-liberal market economy is a compounding risk, ultimately absolving all responsibilities or even rewarding companies for failing to protect the public.
We have proven that we aren't capable of handling the responsibility that comes with handling coal/gas. And unless you live in a shack in the woods you're a contributor.
Nuclear is the only energy source where we have a 100% plan for the byproduct of energy. While I agree we really need to come up with an alternative. Nuclear may be the only short term stopgap that gets us off of CO2 producing plants in the short term so we can get to a long term.
No nuclear planet has sent our entire planet on a crash course with climate change... Every energy source that powers our lives has a trade off and a byproduct. We all need to admit that, accept it and then make a plan to live in harmony with as much of the earth as we can.
I would never advocate for a nuclear power plant on the side of an active volcano. at all.
You put the right technology in the right spot.
Also, I'm really hoping to see thorium get more time in the sun because it doesn't go critical and cause a catastrophe. They melt down but don't explode (from what I've been able to find).
Nuclear power is still an open question, avoided for decades now due to the false dichotomy of "nuclear or wind/solar" perpetuated by the mainstream
This isn't true. Global warming, as the name suggests, affects the entire world, as its mechanism is via long term changes to the atmosphere. Also, it's most severe effects won't be in the form of unlikely "events", but gradual increases in sea level and changes in climate which will put cities underwater and make others too hot to live in.
By all means replace nuclear plants with solar. But only after you've finished replacing all the coal plants.
What about wind? The only direct byproduct is a bit of turbulence, and if you also include the infrastructure (generator, control systems, building, etc), it's probably less complex to dismantle than nuclear.
What responsibilities? If those are: not killing / harming people, and not destroying ecosystems, then nuclear appears to be favourable compared to other sources.
Fossil fuels cause great harm to health and the environment. Hydro requires flooding of large areas of land, often destroying habitats, and wind and solar are only currently useful as supplementary energy sources, due to the difficulty in storing energy economically. Renewables aren't statistically less deadly either.
You can be against energy consumption in general, but I think this equates to primitivism or antinatalism which would itself increase human suffering.
In high-income economies I admit there could be a substantive decrease in consumption without significantly harming quality of life, but much of the world's population is in the situation of needing to increase their consumption to reach what we would regard as minimal living standards.