Irrational fears of possible contamination seem to have a reasonably secure basis in the reality of the past decades.

No one here is advocating for more coal and other fossil burning. So your straw dog disappears. Then the comparison with renewables must take place, on a time scale of millennia.

Not one person on this planet is capable of making an adequate judgement of the effects of nuclear power, since a) we are only just beginning to understand genetics, and b) we don't have a handle on real costs or real time frames.

What we do have is hard, commercial evidence, that overcoming cost barriers and massive supply chain scale up has already been proven on a global scale for renewables, which can't be said about nuclear.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin