Edge cases don't count?
The truth is, all reactors ever built were considered safe at their time with whatever definition of safe. No one builds unsafe reactors. Yet they turned out not to be safe.
The truth is, all reactors ever built were considered safe at their time with whatever definition of safe. No one builds unsafe reactors. Yet they turned out not to be safe.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33232447/
But the bottom line is that renewable costs are trending down, hard and fast, battery tech is just getting started, and development time for wind and solar is comparatively fast.
Future nuke costs at this point are speculative, development time is very slow, and even if new reactors were commissioned tomorrow, by the time they came online it's very, very likely solar and wind + storage would make them uneconomic.
IMO the attachment to nukes is completely irrational. There are obvious economic downsides, no obvious economic benefits - and that's just the money side.
[1]: although since you're basing your claims on the speculative future state of solar technology 10 years in the future, I don't see why the same shouldn't apply to the speculative future state of nuclear power, but that's besides the point
Nuclear is up against against nat gas, diesel or coal (in the rare states that still have coal power plants) for the most part for "baseload" or "firm" power.
Nuclear is by far the most advanced technology that we have ever developped on the planet at this point. Fusion is just 10 years away (every ten years) ;)
If mining deaths are included, coal, oil, gas and uranium probably do not look favorable at all, but renewables aren't perfectly safe either: there was a bridge collapse at a copper/cobalt mine in Congo two months ago that killed 32. Solar and wind use more copper per energy unit than other technologies, and solar and wind indirectly require battery technology. Lithium batteries contain lithium and cobalt. (Lithium mining seems relative safe, but 70% of cobalt is mined in Congo, which is known for artisanal mining, and the above-mentioned accident indeed seemed to happen at such a mine.) Wind, especially off-shore wind uses more concrete and steel than other power generation technologies (hydro seems like it'd use a lot too?), which could be explored too. (Course, these metals are recyclable, so you only mine them once.)
Battery factories also produce deaths sometimes, e.g. recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwaseong_battery_factory_fire, and batteries in operation as well as discarded batteries sometimes produce deaths too.
We knew what to do but screwed up hard is a operational failure and we didn't plan for it is a design/planning failure.
The people who are hurt might not care, but understanding the root cause is important to address them.
Constrained edge cases are fine. Particularly when contrasted with coal and natural gas, which are, in practice, what everyone is competing against in America.