"never needed refueling" Wouldn't that be fascinating?
"cars get destroyed in all imaginable ways all the time" Right. "so the nuclear pollution would need to be expected to be released often" Yes BUT can we have a little bit of intellectual riguor and admit that we must quantify how much dangerous that would be. Let's keep in mind that a nuclear car having an accident != a new chernobyl. Being at most a kilowatt reactor make it order of magnitude less radioactive. I Guess (wishful thinking maybe) that the radiations would be far less dangerous and more local than is explosion and fire from current car crashs. But I want a nuclear expert to show me a calculus that would show if the dangerosity is negligible or higher (how much) than current crashs. The thing is, such experts will not read this thread and even if there were a scientific consensus on whether it's probably safer, democracy would be order of magnitudes too dumb / ignorant to vote for it. BTW the numbers of death due to C02 emissions should be taken into account too.
"we don't have a solution for the contaminated waste that millions of nuclear powered cars would produce." How do you know that? There's 0 funding to experiment solutions in the first place. But I expect it to be trivial. Current wastes are trivially contained in safe places. They do not need maintenance. Do you know how much a nuclear reactor produce waste per year? I did, I don't remember the exact number, but it was like a few kilos at most. So for a micro reactor in a car it should be a few grams at most. Which should be recuperated at the end of life of the car (if not negligible).
I've not even talked about nuclear advances such as reusing the wastes or provably safe reactors which necessarily auto shutdown by design. This already exists, but democratize very slowly due to lack of funding because of irrational politics driven by hysterical people fear (did you know that nuclear was both cleaner than solar AND safer (yes solar killed more people statistically).
"We can satisfy our power needs from renewable sources with existing technology to competitive prices." Wishfull thinking? Firstly solar does not scales well, is not autosuffisant, it fascinatingly less efficient than nuclear (did you remark that solar is indirectly catching the output of a nuclear (fusion) energy AKA the sun?) But the fact is, electric cars are a lie. They will drive no pun intended a penury in Lithium which is necessary for efficient batteries which will be dramatic. Nuclear cars would not need batteries or only small batteries.
Thanks for reading.