I don't think that necessarily follows — desert ecosystems are often relatively fragile. Small changes to conditions can have a disproportionate, negative effect on the plants and animals that live there. (Or a positive effect on some species, which often means a negative effect on others — i.e. things thrown out of balance.)
Thing is, most people are less concerned with the environment and more concerned about things like accumulation of wealth, social status, and in many places even things like clean water, access to healthcare and food on the table. If you want to convince all those people to prioritize the environment over everything else, then you better have some kind of magical way of convincing people to listen and act here and now. "Bad stuff will happen in X years" simply isn't relevant enough for people to care.
If you don't have one, then all we can hope for is to limit the damage in a way that is acceptable to as many as possible, and hope that's enough.
and when it blows it naturally provides for a huge blossoming ecosystem refuge guaranteed to be free of development for the centuries to come like the Chernobyl zone.
Edit in response to the comment below: the false dichotomy. Basically the same old Big Energy tries to blackmail our civilization into nuclear using the threat of coal. No pasaran.
Nuclear seems like a perfect solution to immediately reduce climate impact while we transition to proper renewables.
It seems like the semi localized environmental damage of an occasional nuclear accident is far less bad than the constant global damage of carbon.
It's a better than 99%, but only slightly. Over 440 active reactors[1], we're at ~0.68% at INES [1] level 6. That is in a period of exceptional social stability though. We've arguably escaped some rather nasty accidents in the disintegrating USSR. One could also speculate that accidents might be more likely to happen near the end of the reactor's economic life, which for many reactors we haven't seen yet.
> The waste fuel is miniscule in size and easy to contain compared amd fossil fuel, which cant be contained.
It isn't easy to contain for the entire containment period. Humanity doesn't even have a solution for that yet.
You're also neglecting other risks, like nuclear proliferation.
> Nuclear seems like a perfect solution to immediately reduce climate impact while we transition to proper renewables.
The median construction time for a nuclear reactor was 119 months in 2019.[2] It's not a fast transitional technology to renewables. It also doesn't complement renewables very well. There's its limited scaling up and down. There's also the inherent big size of the projects and the management and lobbying hydrocephalus that entials.
> It seems like the semi localized environmental damage of an occasional nuclear accident is far less bad than the constant global damage of carbon.
Maybe.
What's certain is deploying renewables is certainly cheaper, easier, faster and safer than nuclear for at least 80% of the world's electric energy production right now. Chances are that with the incredibly quick development of storage technology, that number will soon get much closer to 100%.
Another option would be to convince Americans, Canadians and Scandinavians to limit their electricity consumption patterns to that of the average western European.[3]
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267158/number-of-nuclear...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Sc...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/712841/median-constructi...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
Autocorrupt or a novel biting put-down?
Ironically nuclear accidents are not too bad for the natural environment compared to, say, petrochemical accidents - it's humans they are really bad for with their array of bioaccumulative poisons.
Unlike nuclear, you don't even have to wait for a disaster to happen. It just does it normally.
They are the least full of life of usual ecosystems, so if you want to minimize harm when building large infrastructure, they're the logical place to put the infrastructure.
OTOH, you may be interested by the fact that nuclear plants have the best energy density per occupied land surface, if you care about reducing ecosystem impact. That allows minimizing used land.