Case in point, the Mosul Dam is predicted to fail soon, but the local government doesn't really care.[1]

By the time the flood wave rolled past Baghdad and exhausted itself, as many as one and a half million people could be dead.

1 - http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/02/a-bigger-proble...

I think that's a disingenuous comparison.

While a dam failure may kill more people, a nuclear disaster can leave a place uninhabitable for a thousand years. Radiation sickness and damage is also arguably scarier to the public than risk of physical harm from a dam failure.

A lot of people have some religious argument against Nuclear power - I'm not one of them, but a lot of other people seem to downplay the real risks.

We've had a bunch of failures, and they've been bad, but the number of casualties has been low and the damage largely local. 3 mile island, Chernobyl, Fukushima are all obvious examples. I'm not downplaying the risk here but she shouldn't exaggerate it either. I agree about the religious argument but istm that getting past that requires looking at the actual proportions of economic harm involved.

Thank you for writing this. I was merely describing why some people have problems with nuclear (which do exist), and why they are so public and controversial

Now im being downvoted because dams kill more people when they fail. I'm sure they do! But that doesn't change the fact that [people other than myself] will continue to oppose nuclear because of its negative PR

God forbid we don't live in some tiny area for a few hundred years. What will the planet ever do.

Well I think it's because people understand what happens when a dam fails vs when nuclear fails its all this horrible radiation that goes out, or other mysterious and harmful effects.