Here, let the german Deputy of the Federal Chancellor and Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection shut you up. Starts at 24:56.

If you care about not having the environment be poisoned by nuclear waste for tens of thousands of years, then you kinda have to.

A fair dialectical starting point for a four-year-old.

Actual policy experts will tell you that the reason nuclear energy died off in the US in particular and in the world at large is not because of anti-nuclear environmentalist lobbies.

It's a financial question. What environmentalist opposition exists is neither sufficient nor necessary to explain the lack of nuclear development.

These projects get killed because they are almost hilariously expensive by any standard, including the cost per joule produced. They show NO signs of learning curves. Thorium is vaporware. SMRs have proven to be neither small nor modular. These projects get shitcanned not because oh no newcleer so skaweee. They get shitcanned because no one wants to pay for them when you can just do cheap natural gas and wind or even cheaper solar.

The hunt the nuclear fanboys go on to attack environmentalists is invented. It's basically false consciousness. The fossil fuel industry benefits from this strife.

For what a nuclear facility costs to build, buying equivalent solar would probably get you an order of magnitude more energy production, even factoring the additional transmission capacity you'd need to buy alongside it. You could almost certainly get at least the same value out of a combination of wind, solar, transmission, and medium-term energy storage. And end up with a far more resilient grid in the process. And also not be blighting a couple square miles of riverside real estate.

Well, I'd say that this argument is just as simplistic and binary. I'm in no way an expert, but from what I've gathered, nuclear power is nowhere near the clean power with long term storage as the only issue that many people seem to think. Mining is extremely dirty and nobody wants an uranium mine in their backyard. Yeah, next gen nuclear reactors that run on depleted uranium sound great in theory. Too bad they are just one corner closer from cold fusion. I am too for nuclear power because of pragmatic reasons so we can shelve fossil fuels until we have better, but pretending it is unproblematic is ridiculous and plain stupid.

Edit: It seems I have the unpopular opinion around here for saying that nuclear power is not entirely unproblematic. Gasp, my pearls!

Sure you can.

Nuclear waste is terrible for the environment.

I mean, you can. It's stupid, yes but when has this ever stopped people?