Now the cost of solar and storage are dropping at a rate I doubt nuclear is ever going to make a significant comeback. I'm not opposed to it, but I wonder if the economics will ever be favorable even with regulatory reform.
Commercially. Several early test reactors were essentially just graphite moderated piles not unlike Chernobyl, but they were abandoned for a reason.
The worst possible case for water-moderated reactors is uncontained meltdown. And it's not _terribly_ horrible. You will get contamination with volatiles, mainly cesium. But there's not a lot of it in the reactor, so it'll affect only a small area around the plant. Some fuel might get initially mobilized by steam explosions, but again, only a fraction.
The worst case for a graphite reactor is an uncontained core fire. That can burn for weeks and spread a significant part of the fuel as particulates over large territories (Chernobyl).
Is it likely? Nope. But there are black swan events: earthquakes, mega-hurricanes, meteorite strikes, Godzilla attacks.
Likewise, an even bigger "disaster" at Fukushima--that killed nobody. (The deaths from the evacuation are not deaths from the incident--they wouldn't have died if they had stayed put.)
Nobody's arguing for more fossil. But nuclear isn't an option either.
There may be good reasons not to pursue nuclear (high complexity and upfront cost), but by the overall numbers I don't think pollution or death rate make that case
Because coal mining releases more radiation into the world than nuclear power.
...But yes; with the efficiency and price of solar, wind, and batteries now, nuclear makes much less sense.
But the price of batteries is far, far too high for renewables to make sense.
That's so much not the case now that renewables + batteries were by far the largest source of new generation in the US (yes, the US, with Trump actively trying to destroy them) last year.
Look up some of the new information coming out about them recently. Here, I'll give you a relevant video I watched recently to start with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM (channel is Technology Connections)
Reality: arguing for renewables over nuclear actually ends up making more fossil fuel use as the renewables are not viable.
I don't know the numbers for Fukushima, but let's consider Three Mile Island. Same basic problem--some radioactive noble gas needed to be released to avoid trouble (and they actually released it rather than panic.) You are standing at the fence line, what do you do? Let's say you evacuate....hey, there's a street here. Cross it? Nope--it was more dangerous to walk across one ordinary street than to stay put.
And yet we still build hydroelectric dams
That is the case for base load generation, where the plant can operate near 100% capacity all the time. But that isn't were gas is usually being deployed; it being used for reserve generation. The economics of nuclear isn't as favourable in that application as it costs more or less the same to run at partial generation, or even no generation, as it does when it is going full blast.
I can imagine a future in which every data center has a little baby nuclear plant built right next to it. Watts per acre may become a significant measurement of density. Solar’s environmental impact is of course dramatically overstated by its opponents, but it won’t be when we scale it up and have to start slashing forests for it.
Fair point that renewables may have a practical expansion limit, but for the time being are, by far, the cheapest option so a data centre is still going to prefer that source of power to the greatest extent possible, thereby leaving gas/nuclear only as reserve — of which nuclear has not proven to be cost effective at. Geothermal, hydro, etc. are hard to beat, but where you aren't sitting on the perfect environment, generally speaking, wind+solar+gas is about as good as it gets on a cost basis.