"Clean" energy as long as everything goes right for the next fifty to a hundred years. No war fighting in the vicinity, no terrorist attacks, no "impossible accident" through unforeseen natural catastrophes, negligence, suicidal airline pilots (it has happened, fortunately they didn't try to hit a nuclear plant)... And of course the long-term storage problem, which almost no other country has solved so far, has to be solved, otherwise the timeline extends by a couple thousand years.
Yeah, I'm no fan of nuclear power. I'd like to be, but I subscribe to the "black swan" school of thought, basically refusing to accept miniscule probabilities with extremely high downsides predicted over long timespans...
Yes, it's "clean energy as long as" - unlike coal or oil or gas which is dirty energy no matter what. So realistically let's enjoy our blessings and stop fearing such an incredible energy source just because somewhere someday something might go wrong.
Those "extremely high downsides" are a few tens of square km dead lands and a few irradiated workers. Not such a bad perspective for a worst case scenario.
The Fukushima incident had a cost of at least a trillion Dollars, with the estimate rising. Yes, there were lower estimates, those are old. Tschernobyl is still a hazard. You could argue it was a benefit that Russian soldiers irradiated themselves by digging trenches in contaminated dirt, but that's about it.
And you probably underestimate the probability of such things happening. Bad intent is unpredictable. Bad intentions plus negligence plus accidents usually turns out to be worse than imagined, especially on this timeframe.
Yeah, I'm no fan of nuclear power. I'd like to be, but I subscribe to the "black swan" school of thought, basically refusing to accept miniscule probabilities with extremely high downsides predicted over long timespans...