Just create cheap RTGs with the radioactive waste. Invent the process and give humanity the best of both worlds. All you have to do is increase the power generation from a few hundred watts up an order of magnitude using garbage instead of actual purpose engineered materials. Simple.

It’s worse than stumbling into a mine. Look up RTGs. They’re nuclear batteries that have half lives of ~90 years that the USSR loved to sprinkle all over the woods when they couldn’t be assed to maintain their own infrastructure for more than a few years. They were largely abandoned during the collapse, but hunters and scavengers still find these things and even drag them back to the village from time to time. Kills a few dumb villagers pretty bad every time it happens. There are more than 1000 of these things still out there, mostly unaccounted, and very few if any even have warning signs, let alone high security like a fence.

You’re glazing over a LOT of R&D accidents, not to mention the infrastructure that supports and facilitates nuclear power generation.

Yeah, the actual power generation plant is relatively small compared to a wind farm or solar plant, but you’re skipping the nuclear material refinement centers, the environmental challenges and risks posed by transportation and storage of nuclear material, and completely ignoring the storage of spent radioactive materials. Yucca mountain nuclear waste facility was constructed for a reason.

I’m all for nuclear power, but you need to get into the gritty if you’re going to make a good faith attempt at comparing it to other methods of power production. The entire process of producing fissionable materials is extremely expensive, power intensive, and uses incredibly toxic chemistry to get it done.

Fusion looks great on paper, but we’re still having a hell of a time figuring out how to capture energy from reactions that last millionths of a second.

I see you’ve watched a single special on Netflix and consider yourself an expert on the matter. Good for you.

As a welder who has actually fabricated parts for nuclear reactors, you don’t know shit about ass. The core always touches water, that’s how a PWR works. Any void whatsoever in the core would displace the water that acts as a moderator and instantly shut down any chain reaction.

Seeing as a PWR isn’t really capable of exploding in the way you’re describing, horseshit. At worst, it can flash boil a bunch of water and melt. Besides that, the containment building alone is miles better than anything the USSR ever commissioned. All you need to do to have a safe reactor is to take the goddamn people out of it.