I’m an electrical engineer, and I used to work in a power plant. It was a coal fired plant and not a nuke plant, but still, I do have a pretty good idea of exactly how a nuke plant works. The only major difference between a nuke plant and a coal plant is how you generate the steam. Once you get to the turbine, everything from there on out is basically the same.
I don’t pay much attention to scary media, and I don’t have a lack of understanding about nuclear power.
That said, I don’t think nuclear power is the greatest thing since sliced bread. In my mind, it has two main problems. First, we really don’t have a good way of dealing with the nuclear waste. Second, as long as you have nuke power you are going to have accidents. Anyone who thinks we can build new, accident-free reactors is deluding themselves. The accidents may not be terribly common, like maybe once every few decades, but they are going to happen.
Unfortunately (at least for my arguments) I don’t have anything better to suggest that we use in their place. The “green” energies just don’t make enough power to be useful. Wind farms don’t generate much power. Hydroelectric destroys the ecology downstream from the dam, and taxes are already over-allocated water supplies.
Solar plants actually do work pretty well in sunny places like the southwestern U.S. And by solar I don’t just mean photovoltaics. There are plants running that focus mirrors onto salt piles, turning them into molten salt and storing a huge amount of thermal energy. That energy can then be extracted by running water through the salt (in pipes) and converting it into steam. You heat up the salt during the day, and the residual heat in the molten salt continues to make steam at night as well, so this method doesn’t suffer from the problem that photovoltaics have, which is that they only produce power while the sun is shining. All you need is enough sunlight on average to keep the salt hot enough to stay molten.
Unfortunately, solar doesn’t work as well in less sunny areas, like the eastern U.S. where I live.
So, for the rest of the world, do you want horrible nuclear waste that will contaminate parts of the world for tens of thousands of years, along with the occasional nuclear accident? Or would you prefer to to avoid the nuclear waste problem by ruining our atmosphere and our entire ecology much more quickly by burning fossil fuels? Either way, it’s not a great choice.