Despite attempts at secrecy, the list of reactor accidents fills whole books. Radioactive reindeer meat was discarded in Lapland, and milk in Italy. It is reported that half of the 10 million people in Belorussia live in contaminated areas. Some estimates of adults and children doomed to be killed and maimed by cancer and mutations run in the millions. The Chernobyl accident demonstrates the devastation which could happen with a nuclear accident near a large city.
Reactors produce radioactive pollution.
They use uranium and make plutonium. Both are radioactive, chemically poisonous heavy metals. Plutonium, a nuclear bomb material, is also the world's most radioactively lethal material. A power reactor at the end of its life has manufactured lethal radioactive products equivalent to those from several thousand nuclear bombs. We as a society cannot afford, even if we knew how, the cleanup of these radioactive messes.