The radioactivity and maintenance requirements are certainly problems but the extreme regulation in the nuclear industry compared to other industries may drasti

The radioactivity and maintenance requirements are certainly problems but the extreme regulation in the nuclear industry compared to other industries may drastically mitigate their long term impact, especially compared to the many chemicals we use that bioaccumulate in the food chain. With the amount of mercury, lead, cadmium, and other heavy metals that we routinely dump into the environment, we really don't know what the long term effects will be as they make their way in ever greater concentrations into animals across the world. Already there is mounting evidence that these chemicals are having an extreme effect on the top layer of ocean life (which is estimated to produce the majority of our oxygen) and if we continue on the path of indiscriminately dumping toxic waste the resulting effects could be significantly more dire than if we powered the entire world with fission. Properly regulating nuclear waste from reactors and disposing it might be more practical than regulating all of the other uses of heavy metals and toxic chemicals. If we further manage to develop technologies that can pump waste back into reactors as fuel or to convert them to more unstable isotopes (which decay to stable ones faster than hundreds of years) the entire problem can become much more manageable. Unfortunately we seemed to have written off nuclear almost completely and will never get there. These are two drastically different industries (power generation vs manufacturing) but the comparison is still worth keeping in mind.