IMO being anti-nuclear and pro-environment are mutually exclusive positions. Easy way to discern who really wants to reduce carbon emissions and who is just a populist.
FWIW I think nuclear is good in principle, but neither states nor companies have proven responsible enough to handle it. So I'm kind of against nuclear but not in this dogmatic way.
The practical difference is that I think there should be further research to design inherently safe approaches and processes to reduce the risk until it's orders of magnitude safer - maybe something with Thorium, maybe fusion, maybe a new fission reactor design. Then I'd be in favor of using it.
The nuclear waste "killer argument" is mostly bullshit. Highly radioactive substances are spent quickly, long lived substances radiate weakly. 100000 years are quite predictable in geology.
Also the amount of nuclear waste produced is minuscule compared to much more toxic and more difficult to handle substances produced by various industrial processes. And people somehow have no issue with the latter.
In practice this attitude makes you pro-coal (but not in a dogmatic way).
In the real world, waiting for things to improve before pulling the trigger means using what's currently used until then. That has costs.
What's the energy source that's most dangerous? The common sense answer is nuclear (probably because of nuclear bombs first, Chernobyl second). Some clever people might argue about coal given its high emission output.
But at least by death count, the winner is clearly hydro power. Mostly due to the Banqiao Dam incident [1] which directly killed 26,000 people and indirectly killed 145,000.
Of course, that incident is a mess of stupid decision after stupid decision and some might want to claim that it's an outlier. To that I will reply that the same can be said of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima (as well as every other hydro incident[2]).
The fact is that the world is full of stupid. I predict that in the future there will be some solar power company that figures out how to kill a bunch of people with a battery fire. And yet, that won't change anything to my support of hydropower or solar power. Nuclear safety is a minor issue compared to its advantages over coal and other fossil fuels.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_...
So the currently operating nuclear plants that have gone without incident are dismissed? Why so?
Gone without incident, or just gone without incident documentation? There seems to be an awfully good success rate in finding unreported incidents when people start looking a bit more closely.
Whether or not you consider this a severe enough deficit to necessitate a shutdown is a matter of policy.
As to any operation record, just keep in mind that the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant had one dating back to 1971.
A lack of air bags is not noticable until your car crashes.
The question is if we nevertheless deem them 'safe enough'.
It is, because it is also a tautology. To me it has no bearing over the point we're discussing.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/15/nuclea...
"Nuclear power, whatever its detractors might claim, is a low-carbon energy source, roughly comparable to renewables in terms of total emissions. To shut down viable nuclear capacity in the midst of a climate change emergency (now, in other words), as Germany and Japan have done, is a refined form of madness, especially when at least some of that capacity is likely to be replaced by gas or coal, whose carbon emissions are much higher. Replacing fossil fuels with renewables, on the timescale in which we need to act, is hard enough, without setting yourself the additional, unnecessary challenge of also replacing nuclear power."