Nuclear reactors are extremely safe and disasters are very unlikely. Obviously Fukushima and Chernobyl come to mind but so do famous plane crashes. This doesn't

Nuclear reactors are extremely safe and disasters are very unlikely. Obviously Fukushima and Chernobyl come to mind but so do famous plane crashes. This doesn't mean planes aren't incredibly safe. Net, nukes have saved 1.8 million lives by displacing air pollution deaths. Nuclear is very small footprint. There is 2 million times the energy in a handful of nuclear fuel than in a handful of fossil fuel. If you got all of your primary energy from nukes (electricity, heat, transportation) as an average american for 80 years, you would require 1.5 soda cans of fuel and generate 1.5 soda cans of waste. Comparing that to fossil fuels is a non-argument, nuclear is a clear winner. Comparing to renewables is less straightforward, but consider all the manufacturing and process to build out the facilities to harvest all that unbelievable magnitude of wind and solar. Magnets in turbines and semiconductor additives in solar PV have to come from somewhere, and currently scaling to world-scale is nearly infeasible. Once thin-film solar can be done without rare-earths it might become doable, but will still have a huge huge footprint. Now start asking about energy storage. Imagine a northeastern US winter on one of those icy and cloudy cold nights. Now imagine that lasts a week or two. The storage and/or long-distance transmission is unimaginable. In these conditions, nuclear chugs along beautifully, 24 hours a day, rain or shine. In desert sun with no nearby cooling water, solar kicks ass whereas nuclear is challenged. Renewables and nuclear are both essential to responsibly power human civilization.