I don't like fear-mongering either. But nuclear only looks cheap because a lot of costs are externalised. Prudent calculation of costs of insurance against accidents and waste storage for centuries make it unprofitable. Improvements in reactor safety often leads to humans behaving more carelessly. It is a penny-wise, pound-foolish technology, especially in densely populated areas.
Many of the existing reactors were designed in the 50s and 60s, and are overly complex; they grew out of designs that were used for production of nuclear material for weapons, and safety features were bolted onto the side (this was an era when seatbelts weren't required on automobiles!). More recent designs are significantly and inherently safer and simply can't get into the same kind of trouble that the older designs can.
Yet we treat all reactors the same. Nuclear = bad for some reason.
I'd much rather be getting rid of coal plants (which are far worse for us than nuclear plants in terms of carbon emissions, pollution and actual emitted radiation) and have a national resolve to build safer, modern nuclear plants. But the fear-mongering and bad politics make this impossible.
Alternate sources of energy can be worse. For instance, when you look at the total cost of solar cells (lots of end-to-end industrial infrastructure involving toxic chemicals and energy-hungry manufacturing) and deaths from installers falling roofs, nuclear starts to look a lot better, even with plants we have today.
But anti-nuke makes headlines, and gets people fired up, and is better for the oil and coal industries.
>But anti-nuke makes headlines, and gets people fired up, and is better for the oil and coal industries.
Agreed. Much as routine, daily road deaths don't typically make the headlines, the guy down the road dying of lung cancer is hardly newsworthy. In my experience most people are totally unaware of the enormous number of deaths attributed to coal burning (estimated at ~1 million per year globally by the WHO in 2008 [0])
I don't know the quality of the research, but in the wake of the Fukishima accident, NASA researchers published the following report, which estimated the number of deaths avoided by the use of nuclear power as a substitute of fossil fuel based power generation:
"Using historical production data, we calculate that global nuclear power has prevented an average of 1.84 million air pollution-related deaths and 64 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent (GtCO2-eq) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that would have resulted from fossil fuel burning.
On the basis of global projection data that take into account the effects of the Fukushima accident, we find that nuclear power could additionally prevent an average of 420,000-7.04 million deaths and 80-240 GtCO2-eq emissions due to fossil fuels by midcentury, depending on which fuel it replaces." [1] [2]
Consider that the cost of coal, solar, wind, hydro is under-estimated because we don't take into account the externalized environmental issues and excess deaths.
If we're going to try to account for externalized costs for nuclear, we need to do it for all the others too, and the results would not be pretty.
Huh? We have a pretty good understanding of the externalised costs for these. There is no mystery for storing waste and there is a very strong understanding of how easy it is to decommission. What externalities are you talking about?
Similarly, coal and other fossil fuels only look cheap because currently nobody is paying for the climate change they cause.
We have to choose between evils. I think nuclear power is better, because nuclear waste is relatively easy to contain until we figure out what to do with it (for example burn it up in breeder reactors), whereas the world's climate is a system we don't fully understand and meddling with it can cause irreparable damage.
The costs of coal are externalized, and, historically, higher than nuclear --- not in the abstract, but in deaths per year. But practically nobody is afraid of coal.
Aside from waste storage there's also the cost of dismantling old reactors. The Wikipedia article on nuclear decommissioning makes for some depressing reading:
