Nuclear plants are designed to withstand a passenger jet flying into them, as well as minor direct missile barrages.

And with modern reactors, they can't really have Chernobyl-style meltdowns — if the cooling system fails, the fission stops by itself with no active involvement required.

I.e. you have to actively keep modern fission reactors going otherwise it stops on its own, as opposed to actively keep it cooled and safe, like the reactors of the 60s/70s.

Nuclear energy has, by a staggering margin, the lowest death toll of any form of energy generation per kW produced. And almost all of these come from Chernobyl, where 31 people died due to the explosion, then a further 46 died due to radiation poisoning from the cleanup.

By far the biggest issue with modern nuclear is the cost and them taking 7-12 years to deploy, as opposed to safety. SMRs are supposed to help with that aspect, but not enough have been rolled out to get a very good picture of that.

Really we have two choices, because renewables can't provide 100% of our energy mix yet:

• build out nuclear as a base energy load and massively decrease fossil fuels in the short term

• ignore nuclear and temporarily build out more fossil fuel plants, hoping that planet-scale energy storage will become cheap and extremely ubiquitous in a very short timeframe.