Like. Nuclear waste/disasters contaminate areas for thousands of years and cause cancer. Why is that “clean”?
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1. Usually when people are using the word clean in the context of energy production, they are talking about the impact on climate change. Nuclear produce very little greenhouse gases, which make it clean.
2. People fear what they don’t know so for most people nuclear radiation or nuclear waste is like a big dangerous thing. The truth is that most things we do produce dangerous (often radioactive) waste. With nuclear, the waste are concentrated in very little mass, yes it seem dangerous but it’s far easier to control and secure. Compare that to particle and gases that are released in the air, which causes millions of death per year from respiratory disease. The death are a lot more direct with nuclear, but there is far less of them.
If you look at the number of death caused by each type of energy. Nuclear kill less than one person per terawatt hour of energy produced, Natural gas kill 2-4 people and Coal kill 20-100 people. (The variation depend on the study and what they include).
Nuclear might seem scary, but it create a lot less problem than most other source of energy.
3) When you talk about contamination it’s a bit more complex than that. Radiation is everywhere around us. It’s in the soil you walk on, it’s in the food you eat, it’s in the air you breath. Radiation isn’t an on (bad) and off (good) switch. It’s a gradient that fluctuate with everything you do and everywhere you go. What is important is how much radiation people are exposed.
[Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRL7o2kPqw0) is a video talking about radioactivity around us.
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