That amount to saying "I'm going to ignore all the evidence because I don't like the conclusion."

It's simply interpreting the data differently. Statistical conclusions always depend on your priors. We may also have a difference in risk tolerance. I'm willing to accept "accidents almost never happen" for something like air travel because the consequences are much less severe even if a worst-case accident does happen. I'm not nearly so willing accept even a small risk of nuclear accident because the consequences are so potentially awful (the worst case is not death IMO, but slow, painful radiation poisoning).

The worst nuclear power accident ever, Chornobyl took: knowingly unsafe design and a lot of very-very bad decisions to kill a few hundred directly and a few thousand indirectly.

The only two others that even come close: Fukushima - one death, TMI - 0 deaths.

So that's at most a few thousand deaths for something like 100 Million reactor hours (napkin math, don't cite).

There is plenty of data and the data says it's safe.

> So that's at most a few thousand deaths for something like 100 Million reactor hours (napkin math, don't cite).

Sounds about right, but when you factor in current designs and requirements it's 100x better.

LRF (large release frequencies) are required to be less than 1 in 1 000 000 per year of reactor operation [1], so roughly 10 billion reactor hours. The calculation of this considers at least 1 in 10 000 year levels of high winds and earthquakes [2].

Since the typical reactor is 1GW, so ~8TWh per year, and global energy consumption is ~23 000 TWh per year, we could use roughly 3000 reactors globally to meet most of our needs, which would put an event like this roughly every 100-1000 years.

[1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0909/ML090910608.pdf

[2] https://archive.opg.com/pdf_archive/Nuclear%20Licencing%20Do...

Also if your threat model is a one-in-10000 year freak event, you can have as many reactors as you want and it doesn’t increase the likelihood of a catastrophe.

Note, in comparison, dams have killed several orders of magnitude more people.

Just solar panel installers falling off roofs have killed more people so far.

Banqiao Dam failure alone killed an unknown number of people. The lower estimate is 26 000. The upper estimate is 240 000 people.

For Chernobyl the number is 4,000 deaths as the total number of projected deaths caused by the accident over the long term.

For Fukushima it's one direct death, and 2000 deaths due to evacuation.

Had we approached dams the way we approach nuclear power, not a single dam would be built in the world.