This is mostly wrong.
> No. Nuclear power creates the most dangerous waste known to mankind and we have no way of mitigating or eliminating it.
Nuclear waste is incredibly well controlled, unlike waste from solar, wind or fossil. Most Western countries didn't have contamination from civil nuclear waste at all and specially not in the last 30 years. Civilian Nuclear waste has basically killed nobody.
Calling it the 'most dangerous' is nonsense.
> Nuclear isn't cost effective on an ongoing operating basis (compared with natural gas).
Nothing is as cheap as natural gas in the US. Specially don't just look at creation but also the grid, the end to end price.
Nuclear on mass scale is very competitive and has been proven to be able to replace fossil fuels on large scales. South Korea and China can produce very competitive nuclear reactors and we could do the same in the West. France did it in the 70/80 with 1960s tech.
Nuclear has the massive advantage of being able to replace coal plants directly without redesigning the countries or even continents grid. These cost (and others) are always ignored when solar advocates claim of low dispatch cost.
> When you add the costs of closing and "cleaning up" a plant site, which run into the billions of dollars for each plant, nuclear just doesn't make sense.
Cleanup for any modern plants in the West are already part of the dispatch price. It takes a while to clean up, but the overall land use of nuclear is still 100/1000x smaller then anything else.
> Nuclear is far from "carbon neutral." The process of extracting uranium from the earth uses tremendous amounts of heavy equipment, but the carbon outputs from mining (and cleanup) are never mentioned anywhere in order to sustain the "clean power" myth.
This is another failure in understanding scale. Uranium mining is not very heavy in terms of equipment compared other mining. Furthermore Uranium has a far higher energy density then anything else we could mine for energy. Solar, Wind and literally everything else involves far more mining and far more 'gray CO2' in the production.
Nothing is zero carbon but nuclear is easily the closest thing we have. No other form of energy has a lower land use, lower resource use and produces less CO2. These are well established facts, however much anti-nuclear advocates want to ignore it.
One hand full of uranium is enough for a whole human live inclusive transportation heating and so on. Now compare this to the literal mountain of solar panels that would have to be produced (and the resource mined).