Nuclear power. It it a future of energy resource for humanity or not?

People developed many sustainable power sources within the last century, such as hydro, solar, wind, biomass, nuclear, etc. All of them have pros and cons in one way or another, but it turns out that nuclear power source is the most controversial of them. Most popular cinemas show us that radiation goes alongside apocalypse, ruins, dust, and death. How well-equipped brave heroes run away in fear from unseen evil right away because the Geiger counter started to make dreadful sounds. Many countries decided to phase out their nuclear power sources. In this essay, I will describe, analyze and compare aspects of the most popular alternative power sources to help the reader find the answer if nuclear power is obsolete or should have a bright future. The problem of pollution from power plants wasn't worrying the majority of people until about 30 years ago and different alternatives to fossil fuel sources had been developed for much longer. But still, more than 60% of electricity production and more than 80% of total energy consumption gets from fossil fuel sources. There should be reasons why we can't swiftly switch to already developed and much more eco-friendly variants. To find the root we can try to think about the challenges that entail a path towards sustainability. Sustainable sources defined not only by the impact it produces on the environment but also economic, technological, and social aspects should be taken into consideration. Let's study different sources from those perspectives. From the social point of view solar and wind power sources are the safest and friendliest. It has a very positive perception. But it has some drawbacks in economics, due to its instability. In the last decade, the manufacturing cost of those technologies reduced significantly, and a lot of plants were built across the world, but in some countries, like Germany, we can witness a reduction of total consumption share from time to time. This is happening due to the inability to produce energy from those sources on demand. It is hard to store peak energy production for future usage and impossible to keep a constant level in short periods. Hydropower also has many positive sides. People have used it since ancient times, it doesn't produce much waste and it is dispatchable on demand. However, the more power it can produce - the larger the impact on the environment. It has the worst relationship between the produced unit of electricity to occupied territories. To make a needed level of power it requires building huge dams and reservoirs filled with water. That leads to different deviations in the surrounding ecosystem. Things change when it comes to nuclear power. Public opinion on nuclear energy is very negative. Although it is very compact, nearly inexhaustible, clean, and can be easily controlled to increase or decrease production on demand. We have more than 10 000 reactor-years of commercial usage experience and sufficient resources to increase its share in overall power production. There are no other limits except the social factor of the anti-nuclear movement. Fear of nuclear power is understandable because of the disasters that happened with it. The whole world was overwhelmed by major events that happened in Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Kyshtym. Those disasters were significantly louder than accidents in any other power plant. It can be compared with plane crashes. Although flying is the safest transport mode currently, people tend to be afraid to fly just because each accident is formidable due to its immediate toll. Moreover, after those incidents, we understood that the aftermath could have been less severe if all necessary precautions were made. The rate of direct casualties and impact on the environment is much lower than from any other sources, especially in comparison to fossil fuel. And it can be much lower in the future because of stricter safety protocols and more resilient equipment. The only thing that shows that nuclear power has a higher death rate than solar or wind sources is predictions. However, many current kinds of research reveal that it may be overestimated because those predictions use the linear correspondence between received ionization and the risk of cancer, whereas it turns out to be nonlinear. The other thing that bothers people about nuclear energy is wastes. In the major public's imagination, it is a humongous number of barrels that pours down the rivers and kills everything miles around it. But the facts are the opposite. Nuclear power has the best rate between produced energy and the amount of waste after it. On top of that, about 90% of wastes are recoverable and recyclable to produce more energy in the future. The amount of non-recyclable wastes produced to fulfill the needs of the average family for the lifetime of one generation will not be bigger than a tennis ball. And those wastes are currently responsible for around 1% of ionization radiation exposure on humans. It is much less than the exposure that comes from plane trips or even medical imaging purposes. Besides nuclear wastes decays over time and can be stored in deep geological storage sites along with stable chemical wastes, such as arsenic or mercury, those toxicity lasts forever. In the last decade growth of nuclear energy production stopped, primarily due to social and political, not technological or economic reasons. Nuclear power was called the biggest mistake of humanity. But realistically we have a well-known power source, that has all the characteristics that require in the modern world to get rid of many environmental problems, but the only thing that hindering it from fully replace fossil fuels is a common perception. Some scientists and environmentalists change their minds about it and have started to consider phase-out as the biggest mistake of our century. I believe to understand the future of nuclear power energy sources we have to put aside ideological bias and debate about it only with facts and statistics.