For me it’s that under capitalism, waste will be a problem. The government and private industry have already proven they are careless with waste and will skimp on properly containing it. You can say that they can design a plant with no waste but if that plant costs $3 more than one that does, you can bet they’ll go with the cheaper one. In the US we can’t couple a deregulation mindset that everyone in charge shares and do something that requires the utmost regulation. Can that be applied to every other form of energy generation? Yes. That’s the point. They cannot be trusted with anything. Even coal plants dump waste in rivers and natural areas that will poison it for years.

Even if you consider a non-American government like Japan and Fukushima. They were housing cleanup workers in shanties right next to waste. Workers weren’t told about the risk. They kept changing the definition of contamination so that it meant less work. They didn’t have anywhere to put waste, granted it was a black swan emergency but still. There was rampant wage theft for clean up workers. So much malice and incompetency went on during the cleanup while the world kept portraying this image of positivity. Japan is way more open to regulation than the US yet they too had so many problems.

Now put several nuclear power plants in each US state. How much planning do you really think would go into mitigating disasters and keeping waste storage above board? Do you think they’ll just let the federal government regulate it or break it up between the states? How easy is it going to be for a power company to massage those state regulations like they do already with traditional power sources?

The supposed payoff is that we no longer have to use coal, natural gas, or oil. I don’t think that would happen. The government certainly wouldn’t outlaw fossil fuels regardless of how many nuclear plants we have. At that point we would have a very dangerous timebomb of nuclear disaster and then we wouldn’t even get the reduction in fossil fuels.