Thing is coal doesn't ostensibly have a nuclear waste disposal problem because it just dumps it into the atmosphere, the worst possible disposal means. Shits in everybody's mouth basically, worse than that actually, huge ultimate cause of cancer. Small nuclear reactors could instead vaporize the "waste" and boom, problem solved, by the same standards used by those demonizing them.
Now on the other hand, what if you mandated height limit on smokestacks? If a cone were drawn from its tip at a 3° angle, the coal plant must own all the land at the base of that cone and use it only for that smokestack. It can always build a smokestack, it must simply be shorter. Stop making the problem seem so diffuse and difficult to measure, make a big red mark on the cancer charts, that'll address their nuclear waste pretty quick. Or tax the revenues of the plant based on the height of the smokestack, 90 meters, 90%, 10 meters, 10%. Hey, no smokestack no taxes, why don't they try that for size since they hate taxes so much?
So come up with a cone angle and a max height.
Then we'll see who the big polluter is.
Also: I divine coal pays out Greenpeace and other green activists to get them to demonize nuclear power. Germany's denuclearization in favor of coal was a huge coup[1]. Coal basically doesn't care about green energy provided it's not economically viable, then aw hell no. Because if it's not economically viable it increases demand for coal in the part of the economy that must pick up the slack for inviable energy production. Whereas nuclear is economically viable so it just kills coal plants, like serial killers of coal plants (and internally coal calls nuclear serial rapists).
Montgomery Burns, Mr. Burns, is an autobiographical projection of coal plant owners onto nuclear plant owners. The main bad guy in the Simpsons is a confession by the coal industry. Real nuclear plant owners for starters know everything about the plant, and secondly don't do smear campaigns like Mr. Burns does nearly as much as those coming in the opposite direction, the Simpsons first and foremost. That level.
They're pretty quiet spesh since the Simpsons started. And do everything to avoid accidents, cool things. So for one, using really old software and hardware because it's never failed and likely never will, air gapped. Better algorithms, I can vouch. Going for reliability all the way, getting the absolute best welders (nuclear welding is the highest paid specialty in welding). Making investments in more safety. Using Steampunk technology, no really, so in England they used brass and steam valves and regulators but that look like 19th century Victorian steam power plants, because that is not susceptible to eg hacking and electromagnetic pulse-type problems from the atoms. Safety contests with nuclear operators from all over the world (China competes very hard in these).
And they've never fucked up on American soil! The Simpsons has I think more nuclear accidents, leaks, exfiltrations of nuclear material (like in every single opening sequence) than...History in total, by a huge factor, by a factor of 10 in my opinion. The Simpsons insult nuclear engineering in absolutely literally every single fucking episode, every single one, no exceptions no apologies, 728 episodes hundreds of hours of slander. Turns out it's a confession of coal telling people whom they really are.
[1] And it's wrong to expect there not be nuclear accidents, that's insulting. Of course there will be! It's a reaction from coal whose accidents, or lessons as I call them, were longer ago.
And suppose there is a nuclear accident, another one in two years. You know what happens then? Nature reserve, because the only animal that really suffers from the resulting radiation is the animal whose exclusion allows every other organism in it to prosper (note that human lifespan telescoped very dramatically in very little time unlike that of other animals, which if long-lived have been so for much longer and have better adaptations to cancer). The universal predator is absent. Chernobyl is beautiful with life at this point, Fukushima also, and the best thing is nobody will encroach on them with eg bribery or corruption, they're No Man's Land indefinitely.