The "fun" part is that hydroelectric dam failures are even more localized and in many cases much more deadly, but people generally don't remember them either.

As far as I can tell the single most deadly power plant disaster in history was the 1975 Banquiao Dam failure[0] that killed 26000 to 240000 people. Yet when you try to google "most deadly power plant disasters" you'll mostly get Chernobyl with 100 attributed deaths.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

Try 10,000 times more and you’d be closer, but that’s probably still an underestimate.

The disasters that happen when nuclear energy fails are amazingly bad though. Even discounting immediate human deaths, 80 square miles around Fukushima and 1,000 square miles around Chernobyl are effectively ruined forever.

Coal is (probably) permamently destroying 510 million square kilometers of Earth. Few square miles is amazingly small price for a carbon free energy.

Even if it were true, the Chernobyl exclusion zone is mostly habitable now.

It's also the worlds largest nature reserve.

There is something poignant that nuclear apocalypse is better for the environment than human civilization as it normally functions.

> The disasters that happen when nuclear energy fails are amazingly bad though. Even discounting immediate human deaths,

Are you sure you're not discounting that figure because it's contrary to your conclusion? Very few people have ever died as the indirect long-term result (let alone by direct immediate result) of nuclear energy accidents, even according the highest estimates from histrionic ideologues like Greenpeace.

I'm overall not anti-nuclear or anything. The lasting cultural, ecological, and economic damage from severe nuclear disasters is _pretty_ significant though and we need to do a better job ensuring they don't happen if we wanna restore peoples trust in the idea of nuclear power.

Better job? How many people have died due to nuclear energy accidents? If you consider deaths per megawatt, or most any other standard, the nuclear agencies are doing a fantastic job. How low does the risk have to be?

The relative risk of nuclear to coal is unbelievably low yet there is still this irrational ability to weigh risk/reward benefits correctly.

That's what this topic is about -- the standard for nuclear is high (as it should be), but we take the status quo of fossil fuels without a second thought, even though it's immeasurably worse in almost every way.

It's _measurably_ worse in almost every way

Less than a third of the area that's been ruined forever by renewable power generation's "business as usual", indeed less than the area flooded by the Three Gorges Dam alone.

But what if you took the contaminated soil around Chernobyl and shot it tens of kilometers straight up into the air, so all the radioactive isotopes get taken away by the wind and aren't a local problem any more.

That's how coal plants operate.