> Excellent safety, if you ignore Chernobyl, Fukushima, [...]
Nope, it's all included, how could it not be?
> Nuclear power rarely kills anyone, but when (not if) things go wrong, it tends to create a massive mess which costs billions to clean up
Yep, yet it's still the safest, which means your argument has to be wrong.
Just to show you the magnitude of your error, the Fukushima accident was directly caused by a tsunami which killed 20,000 people. But your main concern from that event is the cost of cleanup of radioactive material.
More people die from falling off roofs while installing solar panels than from nuclear accidents.
> but if you want to convince people of its safety you probably shouldn't be mentioning its historical record.
Well you're not technically wrong. As you've inadvertently demonstrated with your irrational arguments, since people didn't use reason to arrive at their conclusions, they would not be likely to be persuaded by it.
> Only if you completely ignore the huge amount of pollution and waste generated by mining, reprocessing, and disposal.
Do you mean to say the waste is significantly worse than for solar panels, wind turbines, etc.?
> Again, I personally don't believe this has to be a dealbreaker, but the waste generated by the nuclear industry is still an unsolved problem.
Inert solid waste sitting in a barrel somewhere is not a problem that is worth talking about.
Again, the magnitude of your error is outstanding. We've been simply releasing all the, radioactive mind you, products of burning coal into the atmosphere for the past few hundreds of years but you're concerned about a tiny amount of solid waste.
> > If we (the West) had built out nuclear to satisfy our electricity needs
>
> We did. France hit 80% nuclear, for example.
You cherry-picked the single country with the biggest share of nuclear by far.
> > implementing new nuclear power tech as it improved
>
> We did. It made the plants too expensive to be commercially viable.
Ironically, that's because the standards for nuclear plant safety are determined by the sort of irrational thinking you're presenting here.
> Taking all costs into account, nuclear is currently the most expensive form of generating electricity.
And that's where the issue is buried, I don't believe you're taking all costs into account.
Is coal really cheaper when you include the health and environmental damage it creates? It literally can't be, the costs of human created climate change will be eye-watering.
Are renewables really cheaper once you consider the end goal of a 90%+ renewable grid? The costs of accounting for the inherent intermittency of solar and wind go up exponentially as you increase the share of renewables in the grid.
Adding the first 10% of renewables is trivial, you need no extra storage since the grid itself will simply absorb the difference.
Adding the last 10% is horribly expensive and I don't believe you're accounting for that at all.