Running it is cheap, but the large costs of construction and decommissioning that bookend a plant's lifespan mean you need a really, really long and mostly trouble-free operating life for the overall amortized costs to look good. At least with conventional large-scale plants. There are alternatives [e.g., 1] that might change that aspect of the economics, if they turn out to be feasible (politically and otherwise).
It's also not "clean" -- just ask the Navajos, for example.
As for my experience, figuring out what to buy and what not, in Munich in the months after Chernobyl. Apples from Tirol were found to contain significantly higher levels of fallout -- one thing that happens to stick in my mind, because I was eating them until I learned this.
And wild mushrooms, particularly from Eastern Europe? Forgetaboutit -- fungii were concentrating fallout up to 400 times (not percent, but 400-fold).
A good friend cooked a meal containing wild mushrooms from her family back in Poland. I felt I had to pass on it.
Granted, coal-based energy spreads heavy metals around, and forests were taking it on the chin from acid rain before scrubbers and switching to coal supplies containing lower levels of sulfur -- primarily, as I recall, in the U.S. being "hard coal" from deposits/mines in western states. Global warming was a concern back then, but it hadn't entered the knowledge of the larger general public.
Everything has trade-offs. That includes nuclear, and we shouldn't be calling it "clean".
Like the heavy metals from coal burning, a significant concern is the very long-term nature of the pollution that does result, and that, with current and immediately foreseeable technology, said pollution is "irreducible".
CO2 warms things, but it doesn't directly poison them nor leave the ground infertile or unusable. Organic toxins can, largely, with enough will and investment literally be burned away -- at least, until you spread them out over the soil. If you have a vat of e.g. dioxin, you can -- carefully -- burn it away. Just make sure you burn ALL of it; one erstwhile proposal for such disposal was to inject the waste into a molten metal mass in a disposal "reactor" with careful monitoring and filtering of the exit gases.
We haven't yet achieved significant alchemaic control. Heavy metals stay heavy metals, and radio-nucleotides keep their own schedules of decay. Once spread around the environment, we are left quarantining that environment -- either wholesale, or where possible by scraping off the contaminated bits/layer and quarantining that.
A more immediate-term solution may be better concentrating and/or filtering mechanisms, for separation of such contamination from the environment it's dispersed through. (As one example, natural or engineered biological concentration and harvesting.)
Maybe nuclear is better than the wholesale smog that kills millions each year, and that used to kill many more in the U.S. but still takes probably hundreds of thousands a year.
But I'm not willing to call it "clean".
And given some of the potential, catastrophic risks, I'm not prepared to call it "better".
P.S. Another, primary concern I have with nuclear, is that no human society has demonstrated continuity and consistent reliability on the kind of timeframes required to manage current nuclear technology and its waste.
Even if a properly handled device is perfectly safe, do we have any guarantees -- or even real, high-likelihood hopes -- that humans will properly handle it (and its waste) until it is effectively retired or neutralized?
You raise some decent points and I'm not going to reply to them all, however, consider that there is also medical radioactive waste. Should we abandoned all of our imaging equipment and radio-medical treatments because we can't handle the waste?
CO2 is a poison, in a way. Excessive CO2 has lead to increasing acidification in the oceans, which has resulted in death of coral and fish. There have been other costs but I am not up to snuff on climate change as some. I do know it is a negative-feedback processes, as these events occur the rate only increases. It will increase even more once methane has been released from the frozen ground and from beneath ice sheets.
I don't think we'll solve it any time soon. I see us driving straight into that brick wall. It's the way the majority of us operate, there's not enough people wanting to change our outcome.
I'm not arguing we get rid of all use. I do think we should stop calling it "clean" -- at least and especially in this simplistic political and marketing sense.
Even solar and wind are not entirely "clean".
There are initial capitalization and resource consumption to construct them. There are noise and other disturbances that cause some near wind farms considerable stress and ill health. Wind farms disturb the lower level atmosphere and there are questions about what effects this creates. There are open questions about how "clean" necessary storage technologies will be.
These should be known and discussed.
One frustration after Chernobyl, was that the (Western European, not to mention Eastern and Soviet) public became concerned whether they were being told the truth by their own governments. In some cases, governments were apparently at least hedging in public communications -- afraid of panic as well as backlash against their own energy programs.
Anyway, I don't entirely know why I originally commented. I didn't bring up a particularly novel counter-argument nor set of facts.
But that "clean" moniker that gets attached to (extant) nuclear (fission) power. It gets under my skin. Because even before you talk about accidents or attacks, there's a lot about it that's not clean. From the mining to the processing (they still don't know how they are going to manager the Hanford complexes in Washington State; to the best of my recollection, the now "cleaned" Rocky Flats in Colorado still poses considerable challenges; etc.) to the whole issue of waste...
I also have another argument. The actual supplies of accessible and extractable ores are limited (though less so for thorium, another possible source). If and as we have alternative energy sources for everyday life and economy, perhaps we should be husbanding those limited and extraordinary resources for potential future use. What if they do become the one viable route / power source for larger scale space travel? Maybe we will need them -- at least until and to jump-start off-planet mining to obtain other sources.
And, nascent large-scale solar and wind production are and can be made more decentralized. This even has security implications; I keep running across arguments in favor of a distributed, decentralized, hard-to-knock-out energy/power network. (Something that can also pertain to self-servicing/autonomous smaller scale local nuclear reactors, once they are in place and running.)
And yeah, I did skip going into what CO2 becomes, once it starts reacting with the environment. Fair point.
I think we are going to keep some nuclear fission power production, but that economics are already pushing us away from large expansion of it.
I hope that will also reduce incentives and the effectiveness of efforts to "cleanse" its image and externalize significant aspects/costs of its use.
At the moment, there is nothing cleaner than solar or nuclear. I don't know what you think clean is but it's not the same as everyone else.
De-centalizing the grid brings it own set of issues. One will be cost of actual infrastructure. Two, management of the power flow. Three, energy storage during non-production hours. It can be done but at what cost? Everything has trade-offs.
> A United Nations study estimates the final total of premature deaths associated with the disaster will be around 4000, mostly from an estimated 3% increase in cancers which are already common causes of death in the region.
> Predicted future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have ranged in the academic literature from none to hundreds.
> Air pollution causes 200,000 early deaths each year in the U.S. (...) Emissions from road transportation are the most significant contributor, causing 53,000 premature deaths, followed closely by power generation, with 52,000.
> Burning coal has the worst health impact of any source of air pollution in China and caused 366,000 premature deaths in 2013, Chinese and American researchers said on Thursday.
In short, (a year of operating coal plants, without accidents) > (worst nuclear disaster mankind has witnessed), by an order of magnitude (or two).
I initially downvoted, undid it, then wrote this reply.
A fleet of many coal plants operating normally kills more people than one nuclear plant accident. A nuclear reactor that is bombed during war (or otherwise suffers catastrophic loss of containment) is not environmentally cleaner than one coal plant of comparable capacity operating normally. Nuclear power is safe by the numbers, but you have to use the right numbers.
If reactor containment failed more often then reactors wouldn't be any better for human health than fossil power plants. It's because they are designed and run with such care that they have such a good environmental and safety record, on average. I was reacting partially to something that you haven't said that I've heard all too often in discussions like these: reactors are so safe, we should get rid of these burdensome regulations so they can be affordable too. It's the "burdensome" attention to detail that makes nuclear so safe. If the nuclear industry had the same cavalier cowboy attitude to safety as the coal mining industry, it would be an environmental disaster.
But you didn't actually call for deregulation, and just making a poorly worded numerical comparison isn't enough for a downvote. I apologize for that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor