Well, in theory perhaps. In practice, a bit of stupidity can make nuclear reactors fail spectacularly. Chernobyl had operators doing stupid things. Fukushima had planners ignore centuries old warnings about tsunamis in the area.
I was a proponent of nuclear power for a long time, but I became cautious when I realized that it still involves humans making mistakes. Now I hope that the German reactors hit their shutdown dates without incident now that all incentive to maintain them properly has been removed by setting those dates in the first place.
Yeah, but as I'm sure you heard before, newer reactors are really well-designed.
I think the low death rate per kWh, effective risk to the environment, and carbon footprint are all clearly in favor of nuclear.
The downsides: cost, time to operation, and ramp up/down times. But none of those have large negative externalities.
Compared to the negatives of conventional power plants, I really think we should be subsidizing nuclear heavily to mitigate climate change -- in addition to renewables.
No matter how much you put your emphasis on the technology, this does not make the human factor go away. Reactors are too complex to build and run without human supervision and maintenance. Thus, incidents and accidents based on human error will happen eventually.
Also, you leave out one aspect of nuclear power generation: really long term storage is required for the fission waste products. This has its own troubles and unsolved problems.
An old salt mine in Germany was converted into an experimental long term storage facility for nuclear waste. Originally, the site was judged to be geologically stable enough to contain the waste for a couple of millenia. However, it turns out that the amount of water that was seeping through was underestimated badly. Now, they are scrambling to get the waste back out. But noone has an idea how to do this safely with badly corroded, damaged and burst containers down there.
No other site has been selected for another attempt to put radiating materials into a safe long term storage. In other words, no spent fuel rod has been put into any kind of long term storage yet.
