Yeah, sure it doesn't produce greenhouse gases, but you have nuclear waste leftover, and if anything goes wrong with a nuclear powerplant, no one will be able to live within miles of the place for thousands of years and the fall out will blow downwind.
Chernobyl was an exercise in quick, dirty, and cheap. New reactor designs are being drawn up that are "inherently safe" -- if the cooling goes kaput the core does not melt its way to China, it doesn't spew radioactive vapor, it just sits there contained.
"......no one will be able to live within miles of the place for thousands of years and the fall out will blow downwind"
It's that way now, LOL. I have to "drive-thru" tomorrow. Not looking forward to the oppressive aura around the City by the Gay. I mean, Bay.
Only if you don't recycle the waste. And since radioactivity represents energy, there's no way we can put more radioactivity back into the environment than we took out of it in the form of uranium. That would be perpetual motion.
The technology exists to deal with the fission fractions. Vitrification has been in use for decades in France's nuclear program (credit where credit is due, France got this one right). I have worked with this technology.
Also do not use Chernobyl as a basis. Unlike all western nuclear plants (and any Westinghouse and GE BWR design for that matter), Chernobyl had no kind of containment structure. Even though there were screw-ups involved at Three Mile Island, in the end the pressure rated containment worked.