I had honestly completely forgotten this even happened until that episode (though it gets a few of the finer details wrong, but nothing catastrophic.)
Remind me again why we can't have nuclear power?
That might be theoretically true for the moment, but not in the near future. Right now waste can and should be recycled which would reduce the amount of waste. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
>...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
>...and because wind, hydro, solar, and tidal are better alternatives in most cases.
Most cases? How is that? The issue with most of those sources are the very low capacity factor. There are obvious reasons that (except for hydro) that currently they generate very little percentage of the world's electricity. In the case of hydro it has caused more environmental devastation than almost any power source except coal and the accidents have caused orders of magnitude more devastation than other power sources.
I've never understood why this is considered a problem.
Ignorance and fear.
The Three Mile Island accident (1979) took place less than two weeks after the release of the movie The China Syndrome, the plot of which featured a coverup of a major nuclear accident. Activists seized the opportunity, and then-President Jimmy Carter (who had personal experience with nuclear engineering) failed to properly rein in public fears or beliefs about the accident (https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=sM1RAAAAIBAJ&sjid=W20D...). Despite a tenuous-at-best link between the accident and human health (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident#Hea...), for the longest time it was considered a "disaster". Growth of the nuclear industry in the United States took a major hit at this point.
Subsequent films such as Silkwood and general Cold War nuclear war fears did little to change the opinion of the layman that nuclear == bad.
The 1986 Chernobyl accident further reinforced these beliefs. People focused on the aftermath of the explosion and the Soviet coverup and generally ignored the underlying causes such as the antiquated design of the reactor and operator error. This incident had a major negative effect on the nuclear industry.
The 2011 Fukushima accident was an trainwreck of corporate negligence and insufficient government oversight. The facility, which had been operating since 1971, performed as intended when the earthquake struck but the subsequent tsunami breached the insufficient (identified as such since 2008) seawall and took out the generators powering the shutdown.
All these incidents demonstrate cases where negligence or antiquated design can lead to disaster. But few take a look at the successes. France, for instance, is a major user of nuclear energy and has avoided catastrophe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Accide...).
Fear of nuclear power is akin to "reefer madness" nonsense in the 1940s and 1950s.
I wonder if Nader's work fighting against nuclear power has ultimately cost more lives than he saved through auto safety advocacy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
Chernobyl and Fukushima would immediately come to mind.
The number of deaths (including future cancer cases) due to Fukushima is estimated to be in the hundreds on the high end. Chernobyl is expected to have killed around 4,000 after cancer takes its toll. That's a miniscule drop in the bucket compared to the number of deaths directly and indirectly attributable to coal power.
