Whilst we do know for sure that solar and wind have an accident rate per install. This is going to kill more people than spent nuclear fuel, which of course does not seem to matter. Turns out installing large pieces of glass high up on buildings is not the safest occupation on the planet.

If you calculate out the total amount of victims for this, it turns out that even if we melt down a nuclear plant in every capital on the planet, solar will still kill more people than nuclear would under those circumstances.

So the reasoning here eludes me: perhaps it's that people don't understand nuclear so it must be bad ? It's how we got to Trump ...

TLDR: public opinion takes an idea. It declares it a bad idea. Comes up with much worse ideas for it's given criteria and enforces conformance to those ideas. Solar and wind both kill more people than nuclear, short term and long term.

Solar and wind have a rate of zero nuclear accidents per install, and as that seems to be the only kind of accident you or anyone else counts towards nuclear power's total they're clearly better than nuclear in that regard.

Are you seriously suggesting that a Chernobyl in every capital on earth would still leave nuclear safer than solar? It's many tens of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl and you can't safely go there now.

> It's many tens of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl and you can't safely go there now.

There were only around 50 deaths directly related to that disaster. Certainly more people died (or will yet die) later due to exposure, but these are only estimates; on one end you may find estimates of "many tens of thousands" (e.g. 200 000 - by Greenpeace, of course), on the other end you may find estimates of around 4000 by WHO.

Also, it is not true you can't safely go there now. In fact you can go there for a vacation trip: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/ukrain... "More than 10,000 tourists now explore the disaster site every year."

Even from those 50, a number died due to the physical effects of walking into vapor that was several thousand degrees. Yes, they would likely have died of radiation exposure, but they survived nowhere near long enough for that to occur. It is a VERY bad idea to spray water on something that is being fed with tens of megawatts of power. This is what happens, of course, when the government orders workers into a reactor they know nothing about. Of course those were also nuclear related deaths, but ... At Chernobyl at least the radiation death toll can realistically be claimed to be nonzero, but people dying from a direct consequence of the disaster, and actually dying from radiation exposure is low double digits. People affected by it, and having worse health as a result of it MAY be in the thousands. However, after decades of tracking, it will probably rather be in the hundreds.

The Fukushima disaster killed people, including 2 people who were outside of the walls getting a smoke when the wave hit and died from "sustained blood loss" (apparently they got lifted up, smashed, and there was no way to get help, given that there were thousands such cases along the entire coastline). More people died from food delivery problems following the disaster in Fukushima than are ever going to experience symptoms due to the radiation ...

For nuclear everything, everything, everything is counted. Uranium mining truck crashes into a car leaving the factory (before ever even seeing the mine) ? Nuclear accident.

The rate of solar accidents, on the other hand is the opposite. The thousands of dead resulting from the labour conditions in Chinese solar panel production factories ? Obviously nothing to do with solar ... The thousands who have died from pollution caused by solar panel production ? (solar power may be clean, producing solar panels is VERY dirty). Nothing to do with solar. And so on.

e.g. https://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/02/chinas-solar...

Furthermore, people don't understand that decommissioning coal reactors is also time consuming and dangerous. Here in Toronto, the Richard L. Hearn Generating Station was decommissioned in 1983 and remains quite radioactive, despite not even burning coal in its later years. There is a 24 hour guard presence.

Is there dispute over the long term toxicity of nuclear waste? It's not hard to find numerous toxic, long lived isotopes. The world has no shortage of waste and the volumes are growing, not shrinking. Im not a proponent of coal, and at the scales my part of the world needs, hydro fills most the need. Yeah, it needs maintaining but that's unlikely to be more costly than nuclear.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-lived_fission_product

No, but there is a dispute over how dangerous it is - or more specifically, how many people it's likely to kill.

We're close to capacity for the world's utilization of hydro. It can only grow ~20% in the next 30 years - which would let it... Take ~10% of coal's contribution to power generation.

Hydro power is generally cheaper then coal. If we could use more of it, we would be.