I like David Collum and respect his advice. However, I respectfully submit that he does not understand the issues of radioactive waste and their implications for future generations of complex life on Earth. Uranium mining creates mountains of ‘low-level” radioactive waste, and there currently are hundreds of thousands of tons of high-level wastes sitting in “spent fuel” cooling ponds that have to be isolated from the biosphere for at least 100,000 years. How that is to be safely accomplished, no one seems to know.
Yes, nuclear engineers will minimize this issue, but even putting the stuff underground does not guarantee that it will stay there. (And we are a long way from that, too, with no geologic repository available for US spent fuel). The maps of the Chernobyl radioactive exclusion zone show that it only requires slightly more than one gram of cesium137 to make a square mile uninhabitable for more than a century, and a dime weighs 2.7 grams, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#/media/File:Chernobyl_radiation_map_1996.svg. each spent fuel pool at nuclear power plants holds 900 to 1000 pounds of cesium137, which is the second most volatile element after mercury and becomes a gas at temperatures where fuel rods rupture and/or ignite. That is why so much of it got loose in the environment and rained out all over Europe and Eurasia.