> Nuclear produces waste that must be continuously cooled at great cost so that it does not set itself on fire and release massive amounts of radioactive gasses.

Seems like you are talking about high-level waste (HLW) which is just 0.2% [1] of all radioactive waste by volume.

The cooling you are referring to is a passive cooling pond [2], there's no active cooling. There are no radioactive gases escaping from the spent fuel - not small or massive amounts. Spent nuclear fuel is a solid. Liquid waste is from weapons programs, not power generation.

[1] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_fuel_pool

Is radioactive fuel wildly more difficult and dangerous to manage than a few thousand inert turbine blades? Absolutely.