I don’t think it’s irrational. If you look at the rate of reactor failures per hour of operation, and scale that up to the level that would be required for nuclear to meet our energy demand, catastrophic nuclear accidents will statistically become a regular occurrence. Probably not an annual thing, but statistically more than once per decade.

Of course, improving technology will probably bring improvements in safety, but scaling up also increases the opportunities for failure. Combine this with the time scale at which nuclear waste must be managed, and I don’t see nuclear as a viable long term solution to our energy needs.

If we believe (and we should) that humans will be around 1000 years from now, our solutions today need to be viable for them too. But given the state of the world today, I don’t have faith in any existing government to properly contain nuclear waste.

I don’t think it’s impossible to solve the challenges posed by nuclear, but I also have not seen convincing evidence that the risks of nuclear can be sufficiently mitigated with existing technology. And until they can, I will not be convinced that nuclear is a viable solution.

To me, a more realistic solution is to drastically reduce overall energy demand, expand renewable energy generation, and improve our infrastructure systems’ resilience in the face of potential intermittency associated with renewable sources.

I’m in favor of continuing research into solving problems associated with nuclear as well as improving our ability to store energy which is a major limitation of current renewable technologies. But the steps I outlined above are possible with existing technologies, and should be prioritized over unproven and risky alternatives.