The reason people are skittish about nuclear is because when it does fail, it fails catastrophically. The biggest failures in memory are all failures that risked making a multi kilometer area potentially completely uninhabitable for decades. Even if the risk is only 1%, coal is a much less scary prospect.

I understand that, but really you have the option of either going all-in on nuclear and potentially making patches of several km² uninhabitable, or going all-in on fossil fuels and making gigantic regions of the earth uninhabitable due to climate change.

It is a choice between a very local problem or a global one. There is no free lunch.

No, we also have the option to go all-in on solar and wind power, and avoid both of those bad outcomes. Of course, solar and wind aren't perfect either, and have other problems that need solving (energy storage for nighttime and dark/calm days, for one thing), but "nuclear or fossil fuels" is the falsest of false dichotomies.

Let the marker and voters decide by removing fossil fuel from the choices. Without fossil fuels as a cheap storage solution it will be up to tax payers, investors and market operators to decide if energy storage or nuclear is the best/cheapest/technology viable solution.

As long the choice is between nuclear vs wind + fossil fuel, the discussion will be focused about fossil fuel.

You can't just snap your finger and say "we go 100% renewables now!". Germany is probably one of the country that commits the strongest to transitioning to renewables right now, and we started that process in 2011 and expect to reach 100% renewables between 2035 and 2040 the earliest. In the meantime, you HAVE to use another source.

That is 30 years for which you have decide to etiher use fossil fuels or nuclear. So do you wan't to dump CO2 into the air for 30 years and further advance climate change, plus kill millions due to air pollution? Or do you want to accumulate nuclear waste for 30 years, but have way fewer deaths and you don't worsen climate change further?

It is not a nice choice, but it is a choice that has to be made. And Germany decided to choose fossil fuels instead of nuclear.

How about hydro? There have been catastrophic damm faillures in the past, too.

Not a damm failure, but last year there was ~250 death in Europe and 10 billions of euros of damages because of the floods. [1] That's much more damages than Fukushima and comparable to Chernobyl.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_European_floods

See - this is exactly the kind of irrational comment that is a problem. "multi-kilometer" "1%" "catastrophically". ...these are all emotionally driven elements to an argument that does not hold water under scientific scrutiny.

Reactors like Chernobyl and Fukishima are not built today and cannot meltdown. The chance of meltdown is nearly 0%. ...and the danger of meltdown on a modern reactor is like what happened at Three Mile Island (which is basically nothing). No one died, nor was even irradiated. ...and even that type of meltdown is no longer possible.

...and finally "multi kilometer" is not even that big. The Earth is 300 million square kilometers in area. Even if your estimate was correct (which it isn't), then it still wouldn't be a big deal.

1% per what? 1% per GWh? Coal power kills a huge number of people through air pollution, and that's during regular operation. So for me personally, coal power is much more scary than nuclear power.

I don't think "deaths per TWh" is the only measure we should be looking at, though. The Chernobyl exclusion zone is around 1000 square miles. It's certainly arguable if that is the correct size, or how long it will need to be in place.

If you shut down a coal plant, the pollution dissipates in a fairly short amount of time. (Unfortunately the same is not true of the carbon that has accumulated in the atmosphere over time.) If there's a disaster at a nuclear plant, some amount of land area becomes uninhabitable for some long amount of time (amounts dependent on the severity of the disaster).

For the record, I am in favor of building new nuclear plants, especially in areas where they can replace coal or even natural gas (it's absurd that this EU parliament action is considering natgas "green" as well). But let's not pretend that they are 100% safe, that the worst case can't happen, that the effects of a nuclear disaster aren't that big a deal, or that we've solved the waste disposal and storage problem. I agree that many anti-nuclear folks are driven more by overblown fears than science and statistics, but pro-nuclear people seem to also cherry-pick stats to better support their position.

Radioactive fallout can be cleaned. Most of the Fukushima exclusion zone has been resettled. Pripyat was not resettled because it was a planned town specifically created to support the power plant and its workers. So there's no reason to spend the money to rehabilitate it.

Those numbers are based upon flawed and selective numbers making them quite ridiculous for several reasons:

For example: with Fukushima the nuclear bandwagon arguments that those deaths which actually occurred resulted from moving people to a safe area. As if not moving them would have been an option or if the movement would have happened without the accident.

For Chernobyl it's even worse since there the bandwagon arguments with dead firefighters, ignoring all the "fallout" victims which to these days exist and lose years of life. Not even mentioning missing data: https://www.sv.uio.no/sai/english/research/groups/anthrotox-...

Besides that it is the same people who say that Germany could have less coal plants with nuclear running. Something which is also not true since the reason for keeping coal so long was not the lack of electrical power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Growth,_Structur...

Uh, did you actually read the source I posted?

For Fukushima for example, the deaths from evacuation ARE included in the death toll (the total number is estimated to be 2,314).

You have a detailed article about the data here [1].

But I am open to change my mind. Can you give a source that compares the mortality rate of energy sources and that, in your opinion, better accounts for all deaths? What is the highest mortality rate for nuclear someone has every estimated?

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...

The source you posted is highly biased against nuclear - and HEAVILY inflated the number of deaths caused by Fukushima, while strangely putting outrageously low numbers for the deaths from Chernobyl.

You can look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

...for a better breakdown, but this wikipedia article conflates deaths caused by the meltdown evacuation with deaths caused by the tsunami and earthquake evacuation (remember the massive tsunami and earthquake?).

Additionally, while trying to predict future deaths based on undetectible doses of radiation is a very unreliable task. ...and if you compare it to other energy sources, nuclear is one of the safest, if not the safest of the scalable solutions.