The logical argument is that we still do not have a good way to deal with the radioactive waste and that a lot can still go wrong in the next million years.

And another logical argument could be that this causes us to delay cutting emissions enough to prevent massive ecosystem changes resulting in humanity's death in the next few hundred years.

It's just not that simple. We need to look at both sides, weigh the options, and find a solution which probably involves a mix where we compromise on having X m³ of earth dedicated for a long time to nuclear waste to save us in the short term. I'm not informed enough to give exact figures and make proper arguments, but reiterating known one-liners won't get us anywhere.

The thing is that there is a rather pro-nuclear crowd on HN here that does not understand enough of the physics and the systems engineering of the large scale electrical grid that goes into making this trade-off in a rational way.

Are you suggesting that the anti-nuclear crowd does? What I've seen is that most anti-nuclear people are mostly driven by emotion in a one-sided way (such as not accounting for the environmental and real human cost of oil, gas, coal).

What parts are we missing?

Regulatory capture and "understandings" between supervising authorities and commercial operators that boarder on corruption, unsolved waste problem, very slow ramp-ups and ramp-downs which are annoying for the grid and a lot of things I don't understand well as an astrophysicist either. But both friends I have in the nuclear energy field have become very anti nuclear power and would rather see it shut down tomorrow instead of next year.

> there is a rather pro-nuclear crowd on HN here that does not understand enough of the physics and the systems engineering of the large scale electrical grid

Regulatory capture and what's essentially corruption is not "physics and systems engineering", and they should be considered independently of nuclear power's inherent technical merit. And regarding ramp-ups and ramp-downs, I have never heard of anyone suggesting nuclear power for anything other than base load, so I don't see how this would be an issue?

I'd add to that the astronomical costs of decommissioning (always passed on to ratepayers) and the fact that nuclear is basically uneconomic. It requires enormous subsidies and always goes over budget. Perhaps most disturbing is the aging fleet of nuclear plants we already have in the country, almost all of them way past their designed lifetimes. This is a recipe for accidents.

I notice that no one brings up that all recent plant construction in the US has been cancelled except one -- which could get killed any day. And no new nuclear plants are planned or proposed for the US.

> this causes us to delay cutting emissions

Nuclear VS "delay cutting emissions" is a false dichotomy.

> we still do not have a good way to deal with the radioactive waste and that a lot can still go wrong in the next million years.

With adequate transuranic/actinide burning and breeding/reprocessing capacity the time constants for waste disposal won't be anywhere that long. Discounting nuclear energy because of stupid once-through fuel cycles seems a bit unfair.