Since deaths from renewables scale linearly with installations I think that nuclear will continue to win that particular argument. Building more wind turbines and solar installations is not going to reduce the deaths from installation and maintenance.

I wonder what the clean-up costs are long-term for the groundwater contamination from solar panel production and for the dismantling and junking of wind turbines when they reach their EOL? Maybe not as much as nuclear but definitely not free -- right now they are a hidden negative externality just like coal plant fly ash, but eventually someone is going to have to pay the bill.

The type of renewable matters though, it seems like retrofitting existing houses with solar panels is relatively more dangerous than building utility scale solar farms (no roof to fall off from, higher yield).

> That's deaths per joule so far. How would nuclear compete if far more renewables were installed, producing far more joules?

I'd expect wind and solar deaths to increase more or less linearly with joules output. These deaths are mostly related to maintenance activities that will scale with deployment.

Whereas: nuclear deaths from reactors built after 1970 are what, zero? That isn't to say that there aren't a lot of very old reactors still online, but nuclear deaths are all outliers rather than modal. And we should expect fewer outlier events per joule with newer designs.

> How about clean-up costs?

All clean-up is relatively inexpensive compared to climate change. That said, wind and solar require expensive cleanup; it isn't clear that this is any less expensive than burying or processing waste.

Fukushima is an outlier, rather than the mode.

> This is not unusual for the nuke industry, both civil and military.

This is a very big jump from a single incident to a generate characterization of a global industry.

> Especially given increasing risks from extreme climate change events.

Climate change will only get worse as we continue to consume more and more electricity, and avoid building out nuclear power.

Wind and solar require a lot of labor and land per joule compared with other energy generation. They also have relatively short generation lifetimes and generate disposal waste at the end of their operating lifetime. Land isn't something we think of as especially finite in the US, but it is more precious in denser regions like Europe.

To the extent that wind and solar displace existing coal and gas generation; great, I support that. But the emphasis on wind and solar over the past decade has resulted in increased oil and gas energy generation, worsening climate change. Wind/solar and oil/gas are the classic "bootleggers and baptists" combination.