> According to the EPA [1], electricity accounts for 25% of greenhouse gas emissions. While that's significant, replacing all fossil fuel usage for power production is significant.

We need all heating and all driving replaced with power, so an ever increasing amount of stuff falls into electricity. In France, where they had green nuclear power for 40+ years electrical heating is the norm.

All driving and heating should move to nuclear.

Modern nuclear can also be used to drive many industrial process including making potentially hydrogen and other chemicals that can then be used as feedstock for chemical industries.

> 1. We have no long term solution for the storage and disposal of enrichment byproducts. There is reprocessing but the results are simply less toxic (eg UF6 -> UF4) and are, to date, expensive;

If we switch to breaders we basically never need to actually do that.

> 2. We have no long term solution on the storage and disposal of fission waste products;

Most of the bad stuff can be burned up in advanced reactors. We even have the money to design such reactors already but sadly idiot politicians have deadlocked themselves on this idiotic Yucca Montain plan.

There is still some very little real waste left, but even if you power all of the US, you can literally store it all on a single parking lot for next couple hundred years without any issues. If we really use this technology it totally reasonable not to have a solution for the next 300 years. The amount is so limited that in 100 years you might as well be able to shot it into space or drop it deep into the earths core.

In the absolute worst possible case, you have a parking lot full of stuff that needs to be monitored and in very, very few scenarios it has to be moved or repackaged. But that is very unlikely. And if we are at a point where we can not even monitor a few inert boxes on a parking lot our society has way bigger problems then slightly radioactive inert boxes.

I literally mind-blowing that people believe this is a show stopper.

> 3. The failure modes are huge. Most notably, the Cheernobyl Absolute Exclusion Zone stands at 1000 square miles 35 years after the fact; and

Tons of people live in the Exclusion Zone and they are perfectly fine. And comparing Cheernobyl to a modern Gen4 reactor is like comparing a first generation Zeppelin to a modern airliner.

And btw the Cheernobyl reactors were designed to make nuclear weapons, not civilian nuclear power.

> 4. This it he big one for me: I just don't trust governments or corporations to maintain, inspect, manage and operate nuclear power plants at scale.

I have bad news for you buddy. The government already build and maintains and inspects NUCLEAR WEAPONS. That are literally 100000x more dangerous.

The US Navy has been using nuclear power for 50+ years and had very few issues.

And we HAD nuclear reactors running for a long time. France has literally had green energy for 40+ years and seem to be doing reasonably ok.

> The counterpoint is electric vehicles. While these are generally a positive, they have more limited utility, higher cost (a significant issue in much of the world) and you have to factor in the externalities of the power used to charge them.

Electric vehicles actually have MORE utility, not less. They are far quicker, more comfortable, have more interior space, less noise, better handling, safer and more reliable.

The lift-time cost of an EV is already beating ICE. The initial cost is higher so that is not fully felt, but even that is dropping fast.

> you have to factor in the externalities of the power used to charge them

And that's why we want nuclear power.