anti-nuclear idiots won't tell you this but only 1 guy has ever died from radiation in the entire US nuclear power industry from its inception to the modern day.
Isn't the bigger concern what happens when things go wrong and the plant has a meltdown?
A problem that we've also successfully solved in multiple ways. Best of all being Thorium reactors which literally shut themselves down before they get out of hand.
There's only been one meltdown in the US where no one died and there was no long lasting environmental impact.
The soviets fucked up massively one time and suddenly the rest of us have to be afraid of nothing
Modern designs can't melt down. Even older designs required several people to do several very wrong things over a period of time while ignoring warnings and disabling safety systems. Half the folks that hate nuclear are basing it on something approximately this dumb:
"okay but what if something goes REALLY WRONG though?"
I need everyone to understand that the worst nuclear disasters in human history, combined, have done less harm to the world and to humans than Coal Power does every single year.
You think Chernobyl and Fukushima were really that bad? You're looking at maybe about 4,000 and 2,000 people who died in those incidents, with the overwhelming majority of them being attributed to long-term cancer years and years after. Otherwise, Nuclear power's annual death toll during normal usage amounts to statistically ZERO.
Coal power is estimated to have caused 460,000 deaths between 1999 and 2020 alone. And that's not even counting the environmental damage, the latent radiation exposure because coal plants and coal particulate is more radioactive than the worst, least reliable nuclear power plant ever made, the infrastructure strain, the political ramifications of countries shutting down nuclear power to become more reliant on low quality local coal and imported oil, the strain it puts on the medical industry to have so many more people who will need extensive treatment, and the cost of labor and resources that has to go into trying to keep every coal plant from being even worse than they already are.
Or we could build more nuclear power plants, and suddenly find ourselves with an abundance of excess cheap, safe energy that would alleviate all of the problems our global power grid is facing right now because we keep trying to use wind and solar to offset the damage coal is already doing, and that just leads to us using more coal.
Chernobyl was so bad because idiots pushed on things they shouldn't have pushed, designed shit cheaply they shouldn't have, and because everyone in a position of power was still shifting out of the Stalin era mentality of "All bad news is automatically your fault and therefor you will vanish down a pitch dark hole and mine coal until every bone in your body breaks if you give it to me."
Fukushima was so bad because of what can only be described as "An Act of God" with several natural disasters hitting the area at once damaging critical infastructure, and emergency crews tied up due to the disasters impact in areas around the power plant.
