Your statement is nonsense. I agree that anti-vaxers are brainwashed to deny science and basic statistics. Comparing anti-vaxxers with people who dislike nucle

Your statement is nonsense. I agree that anti-vaxers are brainwashed to deny science and basic statistics. Comparing anti-vaxxers with people who dislike nuclear power for rational reasons (like me) is disingenuous. I have two big problems with nuclear power. Both are externalities that are never priced into the true cost of nuclear. a) we don't have a way to deal with the waste. This is not a real solution, but it seems to be the best we've got: burying it for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, hoping that it won't be disturbed and won't leak and won't contaminate the area. Of course we can't even agree on a place to bury it, because nobody wants nuclear waste in their backyard, or even in their state... Pro-nuclear people somehow just gloss over this. They claim the waste is not dangerous 'for very long' (tens or hundreds of thousands of years...). Or that there is not so much of it (there are 140 million pounds of spent fuel rods in the US alone, and that's just a fraction of all the nuclear waste generated by nuclear power plants). We have nuclear power plants that can take 60 years to be decommissioned, after producing power for 46 (e.g. Pilgrim, cf. https://www.patriotledger.com/opinion/20181110/our-opinion-decommissioning-of-pilgrim-power-plant-requires-vigorous-oversight https://www.patriotledger.com/opinion/20181110/our-opinion-d...). The article states that a company claims they can do it 8 years, we'll see how that goes. All of this is expensive and not priced into the cost of nuclear power. The Pilgrim plant has a fund of just over 1 billion USD to deal with the decommissioning and waste. There is no way that fund is going to cover thousands of years of storage of the waste until it becomes safe. The long-term treatment of the waste is effectively an externality. b) The theoretical risk of accidents is small. The risk of a nuclear accident may be small in theory, but we've had two major nuclear accidents in 25 years. And there have been several near-accidents. The consequences of accidents are extremely grave: people get cancer and die, and large areas of the world become uninhabitable for many human lifetimes. Again, not priced in, a massive externality. I know there are many different nuclear plant designs, and that some are much safer than others. So, ideally, all plants would be the safest possible design, and be maintained perfectly. Then, presumably, the real-world risk of accidents would be small just like the theoretical one. But that's not the case. Fukushima happened because the electric pumps that were needed to pump coolant failed, because they lost power due to being submerged during a tsunami. Three nuclear meltdowns were the consequence. Chernobyl's meltdowns were caused by reactor design flaws and operators not following their checklists properly during a routine safety test. This is what happens in the real world. In summary: it is conceivable that we might solve the problem of nuclear waste with new technology. That would be very welcome, and it would certainly help me become more pro nuclear power. I'm not sure what can be done about the accident risk.