Like. Nuclear waste/disasters contaminate areas for thousands of years and cause cancer. Why is that “clean”?
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Fearmongering over nuclear energy is the reason we’re dealing with climate change right now. If we had better education and a less reactionary take in the issue of nuclear waste we would have switched over to nuclear power 50 years ago and the 80% of pollution that caused climate change would have never been there.
The issue is what to do with that waste. Which is a real issue, but is one that is MUCH easier addressed than trying to remove ludicrous amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere. New reactor designs dramatically reduce waste. Reprocessing technology has gotten better over time. It’s possible that we could develop new tech that would even further reduce/eliminate radioactive waste, or maybe engineer organisms that eat it, et cetera. But it’s a contained problem solvable by technology, unlike our current one which will require a political solution. (Although I’m still optimistic that renewables will become so overwhelmingly economically superior the issue may just solve itself over time.)
There’s other issues with nuclear power though: proliferation of nuclear weapons and political instability. Allowing any country to build up expertise in designing nuclear reactors and the infrastructure to run them effectively gives them a base level of knowledge and ability to produce nukes. It’s inevitable that they will become widespread at some point, but I’m definitely not complaining about Iran not having nukes or Somalia not having nuclear reactors that aren’t being maintained due to instability.
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