Yet, we have Chernobyl and Fukushima.
What happens when the next time 20 million people need to be evacuated? Europe fell to it's knees when 1 million refugees moved, Americans choose their president on premise to build a wall to stop Mexicans.
The risk is simply too great just to have a neat machine running that produces the same stuff that can be produced with other machines.
See, the thing that goes wrong doesn’t have to be even a technological one. Fission is a process that spontaneously can go wrong unless harnessed by systems that are built by thousands of people. Anything can go wrong and anyone can screw up. All can happen and the same time as demonstrated by the previous disasters.
You say that the current reactors are very dangerous and should be closed down. Please give me a material by the plant builders and operators that communicates these dangers with the people that might get exposed to a failure.
Even in the case of Fukushima, I'd like to point out that all things considered, zero people died from acute radiation poisoning and IIRC only one case of lung cancer was likely attributed to exposure from Fukushima. Fukushima was basically a worst case scenario for any Gen II reactor. The only reason Chernobyl was so much worse was because of the incredibly unsafe design out of the USSR. They didn't care, they didn't bother with a containment building at all, had operators blindly following orders from management even more incompetent than the operators were, operated the reactor way outside of the limits that were placed on the reactor by removing all the control rods which was never supposed to be done, etc. You can pin Fukushima on the Nuclear industry, Chernobyl was solely because of the callous indifference and incompetence of the USSR.
CANDU reactors are failsafe and have been for 50 years. Fukushima or Chernobyl style disaster in phisically impossible with their heavy-water, unpressurised design.
The problem with the current nuclear technology is that one disaster is way too many. The power plants need to fail more gracefully to have the support of the people that are less fascinated by the tech.
When the tsunami hits or experiment goes wrong you should be able the have a huge monetary loss and forget about what happened in a week. Not heroes sacrificing their lives to save the humanity and sarcophagus build with international collaboration. Not a land that is no-go zone for who knows how long.
Yes, nuclear power is fascinating and it’s very neat when it works but it’s too much of a commitment for many people.
And the death per kwh stats are ridiculous. Deaths of terrorist are way lower than most killers. Deaths due to mafia are very low compared to fatty cheese. Deaths due to serial killers are very low compared to kitchen accidents.