I didn't say reckless. But we also can't get the death number to zero without spending an infinite amount of resources. But doing so would result in more deaths due to not spending resources elsewhere. The problem is we can't look at everything individually. We can to a certain point but after that there are coupled effects and also noise. This is very different than saying that we can be reckless (which is a gray term, not a binary).
Yep, it's the classical runaway tram problem: people will die anyway, but we should kill as fewer people as possible.
So, let look at nuclear risks:
* potential damage area is extremely high. If a state sponsored actor will take control over a nuclear station or nuclear waste store, he can blast it and disperse over half of a continent. Unlike nuclear weapon, it will be very dirty, so it's better not to do at same continent, but an Asian or African country can do that in the USA.
* potential loses are very high, up to billions of people, if major part of the continent will be contaminated. Nobody can provide insurance for such event.
If we increase the number of nuclear stations by 10x, risks will increase by 10x or more, because it's easier to guard a few stations than a dozen or a hundred stations.
To keep risks low, safety of stations must be improved by the same number, otherwise, by increasing the number of stations by 10x we will have a Chornobyl/Fukushima level event every 3-5 years.
Do you see a way to improve safety of nuclear stations and waste storage by 10x, while keeping construction cost and construction time in acceptable range?
You can make a good argument without exaggerating. Exaggerating just makes people ignore you or worse you create strawmen and people endlessly fight because you give clearly false statements that can be rebuttled. Most of your conclusions don't follow. I mean do you really think things haven't changed in the last 50 years? You can't calculate likelihood from black swans.
Lets rephrase because the argument you're trying to make is good, just exaggerated and incomplete.
Nuclear has a small chance of something going bad but when it goes wrong it's big and localized. We'll bound the cost as a bit higher than Fukushima (which includes a tsunami) with $200bn. But if we look at the median cost of accidents is well under 10bn and covered by the insurance. You're right that there's also a chance of a state sponsored attack. Though note that reactor domes are designed to withstand airplane strikes. Most state sponsored attacks on nuclear facilities haven't led to disasters and fallout.
On the other hand, nuclear has provided us clean energy for over half a century. Still accounts for over 50% of the US's clean energy and provides and good constant base load.
Coal and gas have a moderate chance of things going wrong. Costs often being in the range of several billion dollars to several tens of billions, a handful being a few hundred. But the big cost is the slow release of carbon into the atmosphere which has led to the largest catastrophe in human history and has an estimated cost of $4 trillion per year.
The benefits are that these energy sources are cheap and can easily be throttled matching demand.
Renewables have a high chance of danger but it is very low in damage (high rate of people falling off roofs and dying). Sometimes there's a high risk but rare (see dams breaking and specifically Banqiao). The other issues are that we don't have a way to provide constant load, there's not enough batteries, low production rates, and some unsolved problems that mean they don't work everywhere and thus require gas or coal to fill in.
The upside is that they are relatively cheap and produce no emissions.
This is the calculous that the scientific community is doing. It's not simple and requires a lot of experts working in different areas working together. The scientific community is asking for nuclear + renewables (not nuclear vs renewables). Preference renewables but when you can't, nuclear is infinitely better than gas or coal. There's some that argue we don't need nuclear but their estimated costs are far higher than renewables with a sprinkling of nuclear. This is a more nuanced debate that I encourage others to read on but take your emotions out of it. The calculous extremely convoluted. Please listen to the scientist. Trust but verify does mean to first trust.
My parents are living in Northern Ukraine (Rivne region), so I have first-hand experience with all that stuff. Moreover, I'm lieutenant. My country is on war with RF. Both countries are nuclear, so it's high risk of using nuclear material in war. I spotted and stopped one attempt to use nuclear waste against Ukraine by rebels by myself, but I lost two of my men in the process.
I don't need to invent or exaggerate arguments, because I can point to problems we already have:
* Chornobyl disaster tanked economy of Ukraine for decades. Ukraine still paying for it. Life-time profits from nuclear energy cannot cover loses from just one disaster. Huge thanks for international help.
* Radiation level in my hometown was higher than in many parts of Chornobyl safety zone, because few hot particles are landed near to town and caused micro red-forest (so they are easy to spot). My parents were not able to move, because the price of land and property sank to the bottom ($600 for a 4-bedroom house). I moved to clean city. As a student, I measured the radiation level and found that my lungs were the most radioactive item in the classroom. It was not funny.
* Long term effects of nuclear poisoning. I watched it effect on my younger brother. People are forgetting about the danger of radiation now, so they're stopping taking iodine pills or iodine salt, and cancer level are rising and rising. For example, a whole school was sick in Northern Ukraine about a decade ago just because the school administration replaced iodine salt with regular salt to pocket the difference.
* Long therm safety of nuclear stations, reciprocal stations, waste sites. How to make them prone to diversion from a state sponsored (RF) agent. How to protect Chornobyl zone: lots of radioactive materials are stolen already. It's not possible to maintain long term full time ground patrol in a zone with dangerous levels of radiation.
* Safety subsystem can automatically shutdown a nuclear station when base level drops below threshold.
* Nuclear stations are competing with cities for fresh water because of drough: Rivne and Khmelnytsk stations from 2015, South-Ukrainian station from 2020. How to solve the problem with water?
I'm tired with nonsense about telegraph failure at Banqiao dam, or mixing of flood protection with hydro power generation, or house maintenance with solar power generation, to make nuclear power look safer in comparison.
* Yeah, the number of deaths from radiation poisoning is very low, so we can be reckless.