Deaths Related to Power Generation:

Although public perception is that nuclear power is dangerous, the truth is that nuclear, wind, and solar are by far the safest three sources of energy. According to statista.com, the number of deaths per terawatt-hour of electricity produced worldwide in 2021, by energy source, are as follows: brown coal 32.72, coal 24.62, oil 18.43, biomass 4.63, gas 2.82, hydropower 1.3, wind 0.04, nuclear 0.03, and solar 0.02. There have been ongoing technological advancements in nuclear energy, such as next-generation reactors and innovations in waste management.

This kind of misses the point of the objection to nuclear power.

For context, I don't support the use of nuclear power and one of the reasons is safety.

I'm less concerned about the deaths per terawatt-hour of electricity than I am about the ultimate failure state of these systems.

Worst case scenario for the vast majority of power generation methods, while definitely not good, don't represent a massive and sustained danger to life.

That is not true of nuclear power. I will be the first to agree that accidents are extremely rare with regards to nuclear power and the safety measures taken in modern facilities utilizing modern reactor designs are quite safe. But there is no such thing as a system that cannot suffer a catastrophic failure and when that catastrophic failure could potentially kill many, many people and render vast swathes of land unusable for hundreds or thousands of years, that's not a risk worth taking in my opinion.

I'm aware that Chernobyl isn't a good example of a safe, well run facility however it holds up as an example of the consequences of a nuclear disaster in that there are still large parts of the Exclusion Zone that are still very radioactive and hazardous as Russian soldiers recently found out.

If we had no other options, I'd support the use of nuclear power. But we do have other options. Renewable energy has the capacity to provide the vast majority of what we need and has the added benefit of starting a domestic market for power generation equipment within the US, something that would allow us to bootstrap our own renewable energy sector instead of having to import.

I would compare this to a special multivitamin that you take every day that allows you to eat dramatically less food but still guaranteed get all of the nutrition you need to be healthy...except every time you take it there's a 0.001% chance that you're going to just spontaneously start bleeding out of every orifice until you literally just melt and die.

To me, that's not worth the risk.