I said no risk if development was allowed. Current technology has risks because the system is built as a pressure vessel. The explosions are due to pressure exceeding the facility limits. There are technologies that are known today which do not rely on pressure to produce energy. They are inherently safe. The safety of waste storage has been shown many times over. Plus there are ways of using that waste to produce more energy if the industry was allowed to innovate.
Our fundamental disconnect is that you want to consider the energy production only up to the point of it's production and not any byproduct. If you completely disregard
what happens after you'll always be at an impasse with the green energy people because that's the foundation of their concerns, Climate Change. So, nuclear waste as a problem is
diminished. Of course we can innovate (remember that word) and try to make use of it in other ways. That should be on the table. Why aren't you allowing for innovation in renewables? With innovation could "the mass of material to produce 1 kWh of wind and solar" improve? It has greatly improved since their introduction. Do you expect that trend line to stop tomorrow?
The point that nuclear is
safer now than in previous generations has already been agreed upon. Wind and solar are newcomers to the energy sector and arguably have seen the most innovation in the last 20 years
because of the investment in them. In full transparency, if they come
close to fossil fuels in energy efficiency
without as significant ecological impact it's a no brainer. That's a long ways off though. Still, for the future of our country, our planet looking 100-200 years down the road we need to explore these technologies and others (e.g. Algae).
I am sure they are better too. The point is that constraints of an energy source are based on the energy density of the fuel. Wind and solar energy are way too energy sparse to be cheap. The sources are inherently unreliable/undeployable.
The mass of material to produce 1 kWh of wind and solar is 10 times what it takes for coal and gas. The base constraints are physics which is understood and can't be violated.
Inherently unreliable/undeployable like the Texas freeze in '20 or '21? The argument needs to be about the ratios of our energy mix not a black and white XX technology over XX technology.