It's a shame the idiotic "green" movement after chernobyl is rather annoying that it has set energy production in developed nations back ~50 years and caused so much climate damage in the mean time... but hey 'radioactive waste is corporate greed maaannnn'.....
What also seems true is that you can't trust a company to run them properly, no matter the regulations and audits. TEPCO showed that. From people I know who've dealt with the nuclear industry, there is a strong contempt of regulation in sentiment/culture, likely due to the annoyances and perceived costs.
This contempt however breeds a long term apathy towards safety and maintenance. It's human nature.
There are reactor designs that are inherently meltdown proof (LFTR) and use almost all their nuclear fuel (LFTR) and can, I believe, breed old nuclear waste into usable fuel (LFTR). They scale down to small closet sizes (LFTR) and so can be more economically flexible. I believe pebble bed and others can do similar things. LFTR allegedly can be designed to be proliferation resistant, although I've seen opposing views from much better educated people.
But the LFTR goals should be the standard of the nuclear industry for next-gen. Not these massive solid rod huge dome boondoggle-prone eyesores.
How many people died again?
We can do a lot better, but I think we'd be worse off if we hadn't built any of those plants at all.
Nuclear proponents (I'm a nuclear proponent) that handwave away such dangers are exactly who I'm talking about from the "old guard", and the people that the greens were correct about: the people who need to die off/retire/disappear (by attrition), whose lax view of nuclear safety and who politically killed the LFTR in preference for the solid fuel design that could ALSO produce nuclear weapons. Good riddance.
LFTR has given the blueprint for a next-gen reactor: use all the fuel, inherent meltdown protection via the plug, proliferation reduction. Solid fuel reactors are not safe
> It is very hard to do tracebacks of cancer to nuclear events.
Tracebacks are hard but we can do estimates. When I look those up I see numbers like "130".
And the amount of fossil fuel usage that greater energy production from nuclear sources would have curbed would have saved thousands of lives via reduced air pollution, particularly from coal usage, without coming at the expense of high energy prices, that increase mortality among the poorest segments of the population, that simply capping energy usage would have brought about.
So I disagree the mainstream environmental movement, that opposed the nuclear industry, got it right. I think they got it totally wrong, as any populist movement, that is heavy on simple narratives and ideology, and light on science, is bound to be, when it weighs in on extremely complex large-scale issues.
What we do know is that if solar PV had got the subsidies in the '80s it finally got from China the '00s, PV prices in the '90s would have been where they are now, and we would today be well along toward a fully renewable and radically cheaper energy infrastructure today without looming imminent climate catastrophe. Nobody would be hyping dodgy super-expensive nukes. We probably would have avoided the whole Iraq fiasco besides.
But here we are.