With this and incidents like Fukushima, as well as what the hell we do with all the nuclear waste for all eternity, I still fucking can't believe the audacity of people thinking nuclear power is the solution to sustainable energy.
I honestly think true ignorance is looking at incidents like Fukushima and Chernobyl and making blanket statements about an entire scientific and technological branch.
When looking at accidents at plants, you always have to consider the mechanism at play, ie what ultimately caused the loss of containment. In the case of Chernobyl, it was a combination of the old soviet RBMK design, and of course a series of bad decisions that led to a runaway criticality increase. In the case of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, it was loss of reactor cooling post-scram because the main and backup generators were respectively knocked out by the earthquake and the tsunami, and subsequent partial to full meltdown in several reactor cores. When designing modern reactors, much emphasis is placed on passive cooling systems and redundancy, either of which would likely have prevented the above accidents.
As for waste products, the biggest contributors to overall radiotoxicity are plutonium isotopes and various minor actinides. The minor actinides are an issue in and of itself, but there's nothing preventing us from using the plutonium on hand for fission or breeding. In fact, several European countries have been using mixed-oxide fuel plants for a while now, and a single mixed plant can balance the plutonium output of several uranium-oxide plants.
Furthermore, one of the current goals in reactor design is finding moderators, coolants, fuels, etc. that allow us to reach situations in which neutron-induced fission of minor actinides becomes commercially feasible (in principle, you can fission any nuclide that is heavy enough, but some nuclear species need higher energy neutrons than others).
At the end of the day, I would personally prefer deriving energy primarily from fusion, but we're simply not there yet, and we have no hopes of covering our current and projected energy requirements with renewable energy in the foreseeable future. Fission technology has its issues, but there's more to it than old reactors and accidents.
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