Like. Nuclear waste/disasters contaminate areas for thousands of years and cause cancer. Why is that “clean”?
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Among experts, it sort of isn’t. But sort of is. In my environmental science classes many years ago, energy was divided into three categories: fossil fuels, renewable, and nuclear. It’s just so much its own thing in terms of upsides and downsides and tradeoffs that it goes in its own category.
Certainly as global warming has become more and more accepted politically (it was accepted scientifically decades ago) people are liking nuclear for its low carbon footprint and its reliability (AFAIK hydroelectric is the only renewable power source that’s as controllable).
On the other hand, it dismays me how much reddit in particular has gotten pro-nuke in recent years and just dismissing out of hand the known and potential problems. If there’s one thing Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima should have taught us is that the *next* nuclear power catastrophe will almost certainly not happen in a way that the last ones did, and by extension we don’t really know as much as we’d like to about the safety engineering of the technology particularly if we scaled it up as much as we’d have to to use it as part of a global warming solution.
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