It's been regulated "to death" because it's responsible for some of the worst man-made catastrophes of all time and has made large swaths of land uninhabitable for ~forever.
It really hasn't though. Fossil fuels kill or disable more people every year than nuclear power has, ever.
Even in terms of radiation accidents, nuclear power generation pales in comparison to orphan sources from medical equipment. Yet you don't see people clamoring on about fewer x-ray or radiological machines.
> made large swaths of land uninhabitable for ~forever.
Are you talking about places besides the Chernobyl exclusion zone?
And why compare the small amount of area made dangerous by nuclear accidents to the entire planet being destroyed by fossil fuels?
Worst catastrophes? Pick any industrial accident with more than like 10 people killed and you've got nuclear beat. A single plane falls from the sky and you've outdone nuclear.
Large swaths of land? You mean a tiny part of Ukraine?
Keep breathing in the radioactive coal fumes in the air, those are good for you, actually.
This is completely BS. There were no deaths from Fukushima from radiation exposure itself (one worker's lung cancer death was later linked to it, but the dose in question makes even that contested), and the deaths that did happen in Fukushima came overwhelmingly from a botched evacuation, not radiation. Elderly patients dying from disrupted care and panic, not fallout. And Fukushima only happened because of multiple natural disasters aligning in the most unfortunate way possible, including a fucking tsunami hitting the plant directly.
Chernobyl was a disaster caused by Soviet incompetence combined with an RBMK reactor design that literally had no proper containment structure. That's the worst case that has ever occurred, nothing like it has happened since, and it can't really happen again with any reactor built with a real containment vessel, which is standard everywhere outside the old Soviet bloc. Three Mile Island is the perfect example, a partial meltdown caused by a mix of mechanical failure and operator error back in 1979, and the containment held. Zero deaths, zero meaningful radiation release. Even with human screwups and old tech, the actual design of the reactor kept it from becoming a Chernobyl.
And even taking Chernobyl as the worst case scenario we've ever seen, the exclusion zone covers about 2500 km^2 of land area, which isn't small, but it's not "large swathes of land" either. You get irradiated from flying in airplanes more than walking around most of the exclusion zone these days, obviously other than around Pripyat itself. Hell, you can take a walking tour through the zone, I'd very much recommend it (after the war concludes :p)
Meanwhile the reality right now is that fossil fuel sources are polluting the entire planet actively. Coal plants release more radioactive material into the environment through fly ash than nuclear plants do under normal operation. Coal is far from clean in terms of radioactivity on top of everything else it's doing, and it's actively making the world uninhabitable at a much larger and faster scale than nuclear ever has, but yet we're holding nuclear to some higher standard due to years of propaganda.
It's not a perfect technology obviously, but it sure as hell is better than basically all fossil fuel sources.
Most of the US's problems on this have little to do with putting too much priority on safety. There are countries that show that you can have a sane regulatory process and still get well priced nuclear. France from the 70s through the 90s and South Korea are the classic examples. Neither compromised on what's actually needed, but both cleared the way on redundant walls that don't demonstrate or stop anything bad from happening. You can achieve both greater nuclear safety and reduced process burden through standardization, which is how most places that have done it got it done.
The sun provides unlimited energy for billions of years, significantly cheaper and without the hypothetical risk of turning huge areas uninhabitable or causing incidents with damage in the trillions.
Until you have bad weather, yeah. If you have literally any sources at all that modern(!!!) nuclear reactors are unsafe (so, those that would be built today), or less safe, than any other kind of power production, Id love to see it.
At the time of planning of Chernobyl and Fukushima reactors, were the people responsible aware that their design was in fact not safe? If no, why should it be different today?
And bad weather usually goes along with with significantly increased power generation from wind turbines. Together with battery storage getting cheaper and cheaper, a long term bet on nuclear seems bad both for economic and ecological reasons.