According to the World Health Organization, about 7.1 million people die from air pollution each year, with more than 90 percent of these deaths from energy-related combustion. So switching out our energy system to nuclear would result in about 93 million people dying, as we wait for all the new nuclear plants to be built in the all-nuclear scenario.

No one is proposing we stop building renewables while we build more nuclear. This is a bad faith argument and just dumb. Stop building oil and gas plants build renewables and nuclear. The best thing to do is build nuclear on top of existing coal or gas thermal plants.

1. Long Time Lag Between Planning and Operation This is a fair criticism but it’s fundamentally misunderstanding the reasons it takes to long to build. Construction takes to long and costs to much because every plant is custom and we don’t have people with experience building them. It’s we start building new ones we will gain that experience and improved modularity.

2. Cost Cost is a factor but the LCOE of renewables depends on batteries which they don’t factor in or existing fossil fuel plants to provide peaker and base load.

The clean up costs are exaggerated by first generation designs. I’m currently eating dinner in Fukushima prefecture and I have no fear or concern over contaminated food. The reactor designs the have melted down did so because they did not have passive safety systems which all modern designs include.

Storage of waste is also overblown. All the high level waste the United States had created would fit in a modern NFL stadium. And only 5% of that is actually waste. 95% is firtile fuel and could be recycled and put into a breeder reactor. We only generate this much waste because we never invested in breeding or recycling.

Lastly with waste it does not need to be long lived isotopes like cesium or plutonium. Recycling and breeding can turn these actinides into fissile fule reduces the half-life down to hundreds of years not thousands or millions.

3. Weapons Proliferation Risk

This is true, historically governments wanted weapons with their power so the designs we invested in were only ever dual use. Modern designs are much harder to turn into weapons. This was a deliberate choice and we don’t have to make it again.

4. Meltdown Risk

Chernobyl was not a meltdown but something worse as it went prompt critical and created a super critical steam explosion. Had it not flashed both is moderating and coolant instantly it would not have melted down. That design was a cost savings choice without concern for the outcomes.

TMI was a meltdown. And it was due to a lack of passive safety systems and lots of procedural issues that were resolved. There have been no meltdown in the United States since TMI because of those changes. Most running reactor could suffer the same type of failure but don’t because we changed the procedures to prevent it.

Fukushima is perhaps the most valid criticism of “modern” as they decided not to build the sea wall high enough and put the backup pumps and generator on a lower level. It could have been avoided and should have been but humans are not great at evaluating risk.

5. Mining Lung Cancer Risk

This is true of all mining and the best argument for recycling our waste.

6. Carbon-Equivalent Emissions and Air Pollution

I think they said things but the arguments seem to be renewables create less CO2 which ignores storage and reliance on existing fossil plants. Again no one is suggesting that we don’t keep building renewables only that we stop building fossil plants.

7. Waste Risk

Waste is currently a choice not an inevitability. We could choose to recycle, we could choose to breed, and we could choose to use the thorium cycle but we don’t because dumping is cheaper. same with coal ash and gas emissions, we didn’t actually calculate the cost of being responsible. If we did I would expect nuclear to end up costing far less than fossil fuels.