French here. Besides the advantages you mentioned, the downsides the opposants talk about are:
- aging power plants, we haven't build any in a long time and many are now passed the initial lifetime expetency, but can't be shutdown as they should since there is no replacement ready
- price not taking plants destruction into account. None have been fully destructed yet, so we don't know how much it coat exactly but it's far from cheap since you have tons of midly radioactive material to treat
- still no proper way to dispose of the waste. There research etc, but right bow we're basically storing lots of materials that will be radioactive for millennias
- new generation plants project (EPR) is many years late and many times over budget because of critical defects in components.
- probably other arguments I forgot
I am personally undecided on the matter, but what is certain is that nuclear might be the best solution we have, but it certainly isn't without downsides.
Neither are the alternatives. Governments, and civilians alike, should carefully weight the advantages and disadvantages. What I mainly know about it is from memory from elementary school. Because this is precisely what we did. Each group was tasked to use pictures/photos from magazines, papers, etc to make a collage and a list of the + and - of each of these sources.
That said, can someone ELI5 why Thorium is the future for nuclear energy? What are the advantages and disadvantages?
That would contaminate the ocean. It's easier to "dump" it (carefully and deliberately) into crystalline bedrock or salt deposits where it will remain for millions of years, well beyond the time that it is dangerous. People spreading fear about storing nuclear waste in repositories are generally lying to you or repeating lies someone else told them. It's a fairly solved problem from the technical side.
- aging power plants, we haven't build any in a long time and many are now passed the initial lifetime expetency, but can't be shutdown as they should since there is no replacement ready
- price not taking plants destruction into account. None have been fully destructed yet, so we don't know how much it coat exactly but it's far from cheap since you have tons of midly radioactive material to treat
- still no proper way to dispose of the waste. There research etc, but right bow we're basically storing lots of materials that will be radioactive for millennias
- new generation plants project (EPR) is many years late and many times over budget because of critical defects in components.
- probably other arguments I forgot
I am personally undecided on the matter, but what is certain is that nuclear might be the best solution we have, but it certainly isn't without downsides.