I'm all for nuclear, but there's a reason why we aren't building them left and right. As a fitter we work on them and build them, personally I've mostly stayed away from them thus far because the pace of the job would drive me insane, but it's good work. The reason why Europe runs different reactors than us is because they run what they call breeder reactors, where they use the excess radiation to enrich lower grade fuels to make more fuel and save waste. Russia and the us banned them back in the day because the upgraded fuel is ideal for weaponry, so there's pretty important treaties blocking that path, and with both of us at war with each other again that's likely not gonna be a good idea to try to renegotiate at the moment.
Also the plants are as safe as they are because of the regulations in place, yes its annoying how they do things, but they do those things for a reason. You are dealing with a source of energy that could catastrophically endanger human life and the environment on a global scale, just look at chernobyl and Fukushima, and we were very close at 3 mile Island. Used fuel is just one source of radioactive waste, you are also not considering all of the piping, valves, etc that have to be replaced periodically that are completely unusable for centuries because of the radioactivity. Most foundries even check every load of the incoming scrap for radioactivity, it's that bad, and melting it down will cause a release so they can't just recycle it like normal. The plants are very complex and take a long term investment to build and maintain, roughly a decade to build one brand new, and the guys who are knowledgeable to do this work are in short supply. Russia experimented with modular ones already, at least a thousand are currently abandoned littering the landscape just waiting to rust away and start leaking.
Yes they are dangerous to work in, when you work in the containment area you sign stuff saying you know that if it goes south they will flood you to save the reactor, takes less than 30 seconds. You wear badges to measure your radiation dose, and you are only allowed so much a year. Not to mention you're doing very heavy industrial work which is dangerous as is. But it is a very effective and ultimately safe way to make energy without carbon (likely our best current option), but there's a bit more to it than meets the eye. Once fusion becomes viable they will be building those as fast as they can, because from what we know they will be much safer in terms of waste, but they will still be a miniature star so that risk is still there. They will also be figuring out the engineering of them as they go, so i wouldn't get excited that they will be coming online anytime soon, and they will likely be much more complex and demanding on the materials so the construction will reflect that.
Personally i view biofuel advancements as the more readily accessible option, simply because the technology and engineering has been common knowledge for over 100 years. The us has at least 1 powerplant running on duckweed, which can double its mass every 24 hours or so, and they gasify it just like they do coal, so you could conceivably grow the fuel fast enough to actually run stuff. Nature has been pretty good at figuring out how to convert sunlight into carbon energy, i say we should work with her on it. Converting existing or abandoned coal and natural gas plants to that seems to me much more viable at the present in my opinion. They can also use that as feedstock to make liquid fuels as well, which is exactly how Germany powered their war machine in ww2 using coal as the feedstock. By gasification they break the hydrocarbons down into hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which is called syngas and was used to power lights and stuff before natural gas became common, all coal plants use this process to burn the coal. Before the oil wells burned the natural gas off right at the well because it was an unwanted and hazardous byproduct of oil extraction, and many places still do exactly this because it's not economically viable to pipeline it in on certain wells. By using gasification all carbon based feedstocks give the exact same byproducts, co and h2, and this can be used with existing or formerly used processes to power both electrical plants and existing modified engines.