This may be a "hot" one, considering lots of people do not like anything nuclear. If you would want to know my "bias", well I have always been "pro nuclear". So if you want to take this claim with huge mountains of salts, feel free to do so.
Here is a relevant wiki article for radiation hormesis. This is a proposed effect that certain amounts of radiation exposure may even be beneficial instead of harmful as LNT may suggest.
TL;DW for folks who do not want to watch video (I have not included examples or numbers)
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Radiation from natural sources (like radioactive bananas you eat, or from soil or space) are always present.
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Most nuclear safety guidelines consider that there are no "safe limits" of exposure to radiation. For example, there are safe limits of some metals in our body, there is no limit for mercury or lead exposure. There is a required amount of vitamins you need, but there is also a limit beyond which they are not safe. Radiation is treated like mercury in guidelines.
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If it has no safe limits, then due to natural exposure, places with higher background exposure must have naturally higher rates of cancers developing - but the thing is, experiments and data collected does not match.
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Your body has natural means to repair damage done by radiation, and below a certain limit, your body can withstand (and arguably benefit, see the linked article) the radiation.
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Over estimating danger due to radiation leads to large scale paranoia, and leads to general public be scared of nuclear disasters, when they are not as bad ast they may seem.
And pre-emptively answering some questions I am expecting to get
- Do you support nuclear bombs? Hell no. We should stop making all kinds of bombs, not just nuclear.
Are there not better means of renewable energy generation like
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solar? - no, you still need rare erath metals, you need good quality silicon, and you need a lot of area. Until we have a big "stability" bump in perovskite solar cells, it is not the best way. is it better than fossil fuel? everything is better than fossil fuel for practical purposes.
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wind? geothermal? - actually pretty good. but limited to certain geographies. if you can make them, they are often the best options.
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hydro? - dams? not so much. There are places where they kinda make sense, for example really high mountains with barely any wildlife or people. otherwise, they disturb the ecosystem a lot, and also not very resistant to things like earthquakes or flooding, and in those situations, they worsen the sitaution.
You're considering solar/wind/hydro in isolation, pointing out the problems with each one individually. That's not how it works.
The way anyone who knows what they're talking about is a hybrid system where you use the pros of one to cover for the cons of another. This works. It has been studied. The solutions have been sitting right there for a while now, and we just don't need nuclear. We need to build out the renewable tech we have. New grid improvements are also an overlooked part of this.
This has nothing to do with the safety of nuclear at all, so spare me those arguments. Those are arguments built against Greenpeace in the 80's and 90s, and haven't changed since. The economics of nuclear suck ass, and that's pretty much just how it is. The US NRC has been granting new licenses, but nobody is funding them because they know how nuclear projects work out in the end. That is, double the budget, double the time.
If we were to rollback the clock to the early 80s, or even the early 2000s, I'd be all in on nuclear because we didn't have a lot of other options on the table. Just have to push through the poor economics. The situation has changed, and we don't need to force it anymore. Vogtle was probably the final word in the United States building out new fission reactors.