Nuclear is the safest source of energy:
It has the least deaths per TWh produced.
It has few accidents.
When it does have accidents, few people die (except in Chernobyl, where up to 400 of them did).
Accidents don’t make huge swaths of land unlivable, only a tiny portion, and only for some time.
Terrorism is nearly impossible, and the risk not much worse than with other sources of energy.
Nuclear energy is not needed to develop nuclear weapons, and also doesn’t help that much.
Nuclear is the best source of electricity for the environment:
It emits the least CO2 per TWh produced.
It uses the least land.
It generates no pollution.
It generates little waste.
Most of that waste is not very radioactive at all.
The little that is radioactive is so little it can be kept in pools until we start reusing it as fuel. If we feel strongly about it we can always bury it.
Nuclear is the most dependable source of energy, and will last us until the end of the Earth. There’s plenty of uranium everywhere, and we’ve barely started looking for it. If needed, in the future we could get it from the sea, reuse 95% of the fuel which today we consider waste, or use Thorium.
Nuclear is the most reliable source of energy:
Lots of uranium comes from stable countries, and if needed, it could come from yet other places.
We can use it to produce electricity whenever we want.
Nuclear promotes political stability:
Fewer wars for resources.
Bigger strategic reserves.
More energy independence.
We can build nuclear plants nearly anywhere.
It reduces trade deficits.
It reduces energy price changes.
Nuclear can be the cheapest source of electricity:
It already is in some places, including South Korea. It’s quite cheap in other countries, like Japan and France.
The key is to reduce its building costs and time, which are so high in the US due mostly to the increase in safety regulation from the last few decades, and the industry’s resulting shrinkage.
The increases in cost due to regulation have been incurred and processed. Future plants should not be as expensive if we start ramping up the number of reactors we build.
We should also be realistic when making models: Account for storage costs or CO2, acknowledge that nuclear plants can work for over six decades, etc.
The problem is that, like airplanes, when something goes wrong with nuclear there are 200-300 bodies on parade for the cameras of the whole world to see. Just the potential for 200-300 bodies is enough for the whole world to immediately focus its undivided attention on the matter.
This immediately leverages the cognitive dysfunction of completely ignoring the bodies produced by all other sources of energy that are not visible because such deaths are not as traumatic nor as visible.
France defeated this problem and one would think that very close European countries such as Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg would have started thinking about the problem through a simple cost benefit analysis, being that if something goes wrong with one of France's reactor we are on the hook as well so we might as well get the benefit by installing as many reactors ourselves.
Unfortunately this sort of thinking always works for nefarious stuff and the nefarious type of nuclear specifically weapons, not for reactors unfortunately.
I really think that in order to beat this cognitive dysfunction we'd have to build reactors offshore, like hundreds of miles offshore and then engineer some kind of High Voltage line to get it to where the energy is needed.
Costs are going to baloon into possibly 100bn for a nuclear reactor that would normally cost 10bn but it's easier to engineeer solutions in the physical world than it is to do it in human psyche and psychology.
