The potential for it to go horribly wrong gives me great pause. Sure, if we do everything right, it might be fine. But people make mistakes. People get greedy and lazy. The worst case is pretty "worst" here.
In the 90’s I shared a long cab ride between airports with a nuclear engineer who said he specialized in “cleanups”. I asked what he thought about the next generation of plant design. He spent the rest of the ride recounting a half dozen horror stories about how nothing about the hardware or design was easy but human factors could turn perfectly safe processes into accidents.
He said you could never engineer out human error, panic behavior and blindspots.
The alternative is the continued dependence on Natural gas and that would lead to the extinction of mankind.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
And that's including the worst-case accidents.
How come this is communicated differently for fission energy? Looking at the data it's a similar situation.
How many actual deaths are a result of nuke accidents?
Depending on how you count its possible more people died in a single airplane crashes than have died in all the nuke related energy production incidents, ever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Airlines_Flight_123
If you want to include ground based deaths 911 was close to 3k people dead.
Just because math says it's better doesn't mean that is how people experience the risk.
However, it doesn't capture all of it, because people vastly overestimate the risk of the bad case. Nuclear is dramatically safer than fossil fuels even if you only count the years with accidents.
I'm beginning to think that is a feature.
The world needs more exclusion zones that can be left to nature. In the last 50 years we have pretty much encroached our shit into every single square inch of the planet. The only areas that aren't shoulder to shoulder humans destroying the environment, are the ones to inhospitable to live in and don't have any obvious natural wealth to exploit.
Maybe we wouldn't be going through one of the largest extinction events in the planets history if we irradiated half the land mass enough to scare people away.