Nuclear is orders of magnitude safer than what? Fossil fuel, yes, but not renewables? (https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindat

Nuclear is orders of magnitude safer than what? Fossil fuel, yes, but not renewables? (https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy) It's hard to say any one technology is "greener" than another when they have vastly different types of impacts... * Nuclear waste remains a big issue for all except the newer reactors, which are uncommon, with little to no planned upgrades to existing generation or storage facilities * Solar runs into land use concerns & endangered species, along with battery-related supply issues (child labor for mining minerals, political issues for where those materials are usually mined from, etc.), waste issues for end-of-life panels and batteries * Large hydro devastates river and riparian ecology, not to mention local human communities all up and down the watershed. It has non-negligible greenhouse gas emissions too, between altering river carbon stores and using a metric asston of concrete. Most of those concerns can be improved upon in human lifetimes. In terms of climate change though, arguably the priority should be to get "good enough" technologies deployed widely and quickly enough to change the emissions trajectory ASAP, if it's not already too late (it probably is). In that sense both nuclear and renewables are a net positive (in an off-the-cuff cost-benefit analysis weighing the urgency of climate change vs future issues). But of all the types, nuclear alone leaves behind a non-trivial issue for thousands of years into the future. We can fix most other energy mistakes within a decade or few; not so much nuclear waste creation and storage, especially in an era of increasing geopolitical instability and waning democratic checks & balances. Stable and safe nuclear power relies not just on technological and economic factors, but also on stable and safe world regimes and balances of power that can limit both combat and proliferation, especially to non-state actors. None of those can be guaranteed in this century. Domestic regulations aside, existing nuclear powers have a strong vested interest in limiting nuclear access to nations outside of existing blocs/alliances. I would be strongly pro-nuclear in an idealized world run by sane scientists and engineers, but that's very much NOT the world we live in.