Though they are plenty problematic. It is also the hundreds(in the US alone) of smaller disasters. Things like Rocky Flats and Uraven in Colorado, Coldwater Creek in St. Louis, and many, many more. I personally know of two radioactive sources lost in the wilds of West Texas, quietly decaying away, a danger to anybody who gets close, and the hope is they don't get into the groundwater. All of these are chalked up to human error, and human error happens quite frequently, despite all of the regulations and precautions taken.
Then there is the question of what to do with the waste. Not just spent fuel rods, but the everyday stuff, swipes, gloves, tools, etc. You can't bury them, too much of a threat to groundwater. Right now the latest "solution" is above ground dry casks, which will work fine until the casks fail(radiation plays hell with most materials over time), or a natural disaster, tornado, fire, flood, comes along.
I agree, we can't continue the use of fossil fuels. Which is why we need to switch to a basket of clean energy, wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, whatever works for a particular region. We also need a vast upgrade in our transmission infrastructure, to transmit energy(electricity) from places experiencing low demand to places experiencing high demand. Furthermore we need to get away from the central producer model of energy production to a more decentralized model where every house has solar panels and battery system. Yes, we need better battery tech, but that is coming, sodium ion shows promise and others are coming.
The biggest roadblock to this are corporations, they like the central production model because it gives them a continous revenue stream. They like fossil fuels and nuclear power because they don't have to pay the price for the damage they do to the environment. A clean energy, decentralized power grid threatens their profit margin, so they buy politicians and lobbyists to stop it. Do you realize that if we had started down the road of clean energy alternatives fifty years ago, by the year 2000 fifty percent of our energy needs would have been supplied by clean energy, and that's using 1975 solar and wind tech, which has come a long way since then.
Nuclear power and its subsequent waste is nothing more than a ticking time bomb, a bomb we're passing down to our children and grandchildren.
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