I'm not one of those physicists, mind you. I think keeping all the problems substantively in liquid or solid phase gives us a better chance than automatically pumping them in gas form into the atmosphere. not to mention the transport efforts go from a daily coal train per powerplant to a single semi every 18 months. All the logistics up stream similarly impacted. I'll grant it's not as straight forward as disassembling and then burning a mountain in west virginia every few years, but the over all footprints way smaller.
The radioactive problems as they are, they're still better than the chemical ones from coal plants, if we'd decided to change history in the 40's and replace all the nuclear plants with coal ones we'd have killed millions[0] more people more subtly.
That's still not accounting for all the trouble you might run into when scaling up nuclear power. It would also not be enough to do this in highly stable western-style democracies. It's not accounting for all the cost that goes into developing the nuclear industry and dealing with all the consequences. All those cost calculations are either very optimistic or fraught with uncertainties.
It doesn't matter if it's hard, it's the steady state power option that doesn't have any marginal carbon output and is essentially site agnostic. We've been deficit spending our power budget for a century and now we're surprised things are going to get a bit harder?
With the slight difference that the "gas form", meaning CO2 can eventually be reabsorbed by plants... the radioactive waste not so much. It has to be kept separate from animal and Human life for millenia ...
The radioactive problems as they are, they're still better than the chemical ones from coal plants, if we'd decided to change history in the 40's and replace all the nuclear plants with coal ones we'd have killed millions[0] more people more subtly.
[0]https://e360.yale.edu/digest/nuclear_power_has_prevented_184...