I know this is kinda old but I feel the need to respond to this.
This is my point... we're setting up ticking time bombs and saying we KNOW they are safe when we likely have yet to be hit by earth shattering disaster scenarios that we can't imagine as possible yet because they haven't happened yet. What's going to happen to all of the Nuc plants on the North American continent, for example, when Yellowstone goes off?
When Yellowstone goes off the vast majority of people on North America will be dead within days. Some Nuclear plants melting down won't even be tertiary concerns.
Or when a random meteor strikes that perhaps mostly could've been survived but now we've dotted the landscape with regions that can't be lived in for the rest of all time in addition to the woes caused by the initial disaster?
If a meteor hits that is survivable nuke plants melting down won't change that fact. You seems to be vastly overestimating just how big the contamination area of a nuclear plant melting down is. Nuclear plants don't go off like nuclear bombs when they fail, you get smallish steam explosions at the worst. Reactor fuel is 3-4% enriched, weapons grade material is 90+% enriched. Also, you are
extremely overestimating how long the fallout and radiation lasts. Nuclear bombs purposely built to cause as much fallout as possible only last a century or two, not forever.
Our imagination of disaster scenarios is likely not beginning to fathom the big picture - these generators, when they go wrong, leave a scar that cannot be healed, no matter how many workers you put out to 'scrub' the fallout.
Yes they can, radiation decays away naturally. It's not a forever thing.
Regardless of the amount of immediate pollution a coal plant can generate, and how damaging it might be right now, in half a million years nobody would ever know it existed... the fact that the same can be completely untrue of a nuclear generator that went wrong says everything imo.
Again, fallout lasts a century or two at the maximum, not millions of years. Also, fossil fuels are affecting the climate of the entire world, nuclear meltdowns only effect the immediate area around said plant.
We have 2 (well... really 3) examples of nuclear accidents already. Is it not simply common sense that we must at some point admit that no matter how much humanity may think itself capable of perfection, it is impossible to obtain? And with that in mind, is it ever prudent to play with fire of this magnitude, no matter how under control you may think it to be?
Three accidents out of the over 430 in the world that have been working perfectly for decades. Chernobyl melted-down due to really shoddy building and gross negligence, Three Mile Island melted-down due to poor training and poor labeling of the new computer systems in it, and Fukushima took two natural disasters in one day to meltdown.
Honestly, the fact that two natural disasters only caused it to slightly melt down speaks to how safe it is. There's not very many things on this world built to withstand a 9.0 earthquake and a tsunami back to back. Also the fact that it was the only one in Japan that happened to out of their over twenty plants.