Well, there's no reason to assume that Nero was angry enough to want to kill six billion people when he first got out of the time warp! So thinking of destroying Vulcan wasn't necessarily a great plot but it might've taken him quite some time to come to that as the logical thing to do next.

Romulan women are soldiers and stuff, so it's probably safe to say they're miners, too. So there probably were kids there. KIRK YOU KILLED ROMULAN CHILDREN >/