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Safety: The Chernobyl reactor was an ancient Soviet design. Modern designs are much safer and more resistant to human error. With a failsafe design, there is no possibility of a black swan event. A black swan event is by definition unpredictable, but for a reactor it is in fact possible to predict and account for all possible failure modes.
As for military attacks on nuclear plants, the very worst that could happen is a Chernobyl-type scenario where a city-sized area is contaminated. There is no global risk. Most likely, even in a direct strike on a reactor, the contamination wouldn't be nearly as bad. Nuclear plants have insane security, so a terrorist attack or sabotage couldn't do very much. And it should be noted that hydro plants are also vulnerable to attacks (and even random failures) that could result in large-scale destruction, including thousands of direct and immediate deaths.
Waste: The warnings for people 10,000 years in the future are in case civilization collapses and humans basically revert to the bronze age. I don't know why anyone would take this seriously.
Nuclear waste is only considered extremely dangerous because of double standards. Burning coal produces radioactive ash. If the same standards were applied to coal as are applied to nuclear energy, the ash would be classified as low-level radioactive waste and would need special procedures to dispose of it. In reality, it is mixed into cement to build roads. High-level waste, which actually is dangerous, exists, but there is so little of it that it can just be stored somewhere securely.
Does that "worst that could happen" include the scenario of using a nuclear bomb against a nuclear reactor? That seems to me like it would produce a substantial jump in global background radiation, although of course nowhere near enough to actually give everyone radiation sickness.
Like, obviously this is out of reach for a terrorist, because lol terrorists don't have nukes, but it stuck out to me as one of two obvious ways to raise global background radiation by a lot (the other being "have WWIII in which thousands of nukes get used") and I'd be interested to know whether I was mistaken.
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