Hydroelectric dams have the same issue. I also bet, that if one of those gigawatt lithium battery storage facilities had a fire, it would be a very bad day for people around them.
The fire at the lithium battery station would burn out after a while, and the area repopulated very soon.
The nuclear waste land like Chernobyl is uninhabitable for the foreseeable future.
Japan: in the past they invested in nuclear power, now they don't want it anymore BUT need gridpower and have no other way to obtain it than to (reluctantly) restart some reactors.
(1) When flight accidents happen, they suddenly overturn the lives of a LOT of commoners all at once as opposed to slow and creeping and often "statistically determined" impact of cars
(2) technocrats have consistently failed to demonstrate the ability to create organisations that over the long term prioritize safety and the ability to prevent accidents over all else
This is not the same as deaths.
Then perhaps the US Navy and their US Navy Corps of Engineers need to be tasked with building & maintaining a system of land-based reactors
Instead of worrying about the loss off coolant, the operators worried about the reactor "going solid", which is slang for "no steam bubble is left in the primary coolant circuit". This made sense on the small Navy reactors they were trained on, but on the large land based ones. Arguably, it never made sense to take a submarine engine and turn it into a power plant.
(1) When nuclear accidents happen, they suddenly overturn the lives of a LOT of commoners all at once as opposed to slow and creeping and often "statistically determined" impact of other energy tech
(2) technocrats have consistently failed to demonstrate the ability to create organisations that over the long term prioritize safety and the ability to prevent accidents over all else (maybe with the exception of US Naval Reactors org - but who knows given the secracy)
People instinctively get this now. Fukushima was especially a bad shakeup because "if even the Japanese can't do safety right, why would we trust the dumb nerds we went to school with to be able to do so".
We should move on and focus on other clean energy tech, scaling up storage tech and stop wasting time and energy debating fission. And Maybe figure out a rebranding for "nuclear fusion" whenever it works (hopefully within my lifetime) assuming it's safety profile is better.