What if a warring nation destroyed a hydroelectric dam and it flooded an entire town? Does this mean we should give up on hydro power?
What would happen if a terrorist gained access to your city's water treatment facility and contaminated it with a bioweapon resistant to chlorine? Does this mean we shouldn't have water delivery for our cities?
What would happen if a terrorist or warring nation gained access to your country's institute of virology where you are performing gain-of-function research, and they unleash a superbug you didn't intend into the population? Should we not perform medical science then?
What would happen if you built a really tall building and a terrorist decided to fly an airplane into it? Should we not build tall buildings anymore?
The newer technologies, with the much smaller reactor cores can greatly limit the destructive capabilities even to the point where a meltdown caused by some unforseen event will be entirely containable.
Almost all interesting tech we're playing with lately does not fall in this category... and there's nothing we can do about it, that's the evolution of tech.
When interstellar-spaceships will be built, they'll practically be equivalent to "planet destroying nukes" and pretty sure accidents will happen (eg. fully scortching a planet inhabited by a few billions). AI if something ~human-level gets capable of a stretch of exponential self-improvement will be similar, but that will probably be the end of bio-humans and nothing we can do about it so no need to worry (just focus on making sure important human knowledge gets passed on to our non-human descendants).
Only way to mitigate this is to DISPERSE (establish colonies on multiple planets) and MULTIPLY (so that an accident with eg. a 99% lethality thing still leaves enough humans around to maintain a technological civilization preserving the knowledge of our ancestors). We're a bloody virus, so better embrace our nature and start to act like an effective one. There's genocide in our pasts, and there's likely exponentially more genocide in our future, we need to be resilient and accept (mass) death as part of our techno-evolution...
That doesn't mean nuclear technology doesn't have advantages. It very much has. Arguably, it's both the cleanest and most consistent way of energy production at the same time.
The trade-off is security, as mentioned by the commenter, is security. If society decides to invest in nuclear energy, it has to be willing to accept the consequences of that choice.
The technology isn't "bad" in and of itself. It's context and intentions leveraging said technology which shifts perceptions towards "good" or "bad". If the Russians would clearly recognize the challenges associated with securing a captured nuclear power plant, and take them to heart, the conversation would steer into a different direction.
But the difference between hydro, tall buildings, etc is the critical physical security aspect nuke plants have. I agree with the point that the nuke plants seem to be capable of pretty safe operations.
But, using the 40 years of activism from the Plowshares movement[0] as one example, doesn't seem like we're capable of securing the plants from "terrorists" with the no-fail rate that I'd somewhat want for nuke physical security. As recently as '12, Oak Ridge of all places was broken into via Plowshares activists.
So if we can't track a known activist group that does this, what are our long term odds of tracking an unknown terror group with good opsec (signal, decentralized org, etc), with 100% success rate? Your comparison to virology fits here, and the two (nuke vs. dangerous medicine) seem to be treated differently in this regard, and that scares me, for one.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plowshares_movementhttps://en....
Arguably the only reason this war is possible is because Germany shutdown all their nuclear plants (there are a few plants left slated to be closed this year) and now rely on Russia for oil & gas. The existing sanctions are hurting, but Russia is still collecting hundreds of millions of dollars a day in oil & gas revenue. That revenue has actually gone up dramatically during the war due to increased gas & oil prices.
Your concern is real, and we should do more to secure our nuclear power from accidents, but in practice energy dependence seems a greater threat to global security than nuclear power plant terrorism (also consider that there is some relation between Iraq exporting oil and wars occurring there). Similarly, the use of coal (which would be unnecessary with more nuclear production) is responsible for a much greater reduction of life span than terrorist attacks and nuclear accidents.
By all accounts, the Russian forces fired missiles at the Zaporizhzhia power plant, and there was a fire on site. I too was somewhat dismissive of the "omg Chernobyl 2.0" rhetoric. It's a PWR, much newer design, quite like most Western PWR designs, with containment, and a lot more passive safety features than something like the RBMKs at Chernobyl. The likely outcome of a missile hitting the containment building itself is a wasted missile, and something hitting the cooling or support facilities would lead most likely to a power cut, not a meltdown, and even if there was a meltdown, it would likely be largely contained.
Still. I do think it's fair to say that firing missiles and causing explosions and/or fires at an operating nuclear power plant has some degree of very real risk of causing a nuclear accident.
It does seem there was very careless firing by the Russians that was targeted at Ukranians. They don't seem to have been targeting the plant in any way, but their firing could have easily damaged the plant further if the Ukranians had taken position deeper inside it. It doesn't seem there was any danger of breaching the nuclear reactor itself, but there was danger of destroying the subsystems required for safe operation of the reactor.
Obviously Russia is the one starting a war and being careless here, but it also does seem Ukraine should not station troops inside a nuclear facility but instead maintain their troops a good distance away from it.