yes, but no.

so yes, nuclear is (almost?) the safest, but the direction of causality is the opposite.

it's safe because we made it safe, because the inherent nature basically necessitates is (because it's a form of energy generation that is a lot more efficient in big plants, and because fissile material requires a very careful handling compared to - for example - coal, and therefore the cost-benefit trade-offs of making NPPs very safe is basically a no-brainer up to a point)

the problem is that it's hard to find this inflection point where "more safety against acute problems" actually leads to more harm from "chronic problems", basically where we are reducing the meltdown events so low that we end up suffocating in fly ash from coal power plants. (not to mention the secondary effects of "killing" the nuclear industry.)

Meltdown events have basically been zero on designs for decades. But we still have massive barriers against nuclear when even things like wind kill more.

Everyone talks about Fukushima and the half a dozen cancer cases. Nobody talks about the ten thousand that died from other effects from the earthquake, nobody talks about the thousands that died that year to produce the same amount of output from coal

Same with airline security. I get my toothpaste check Kes out because of the “potential” of some deaths, yet nobody stopped me driving to the airport that morning, and driving actually kills thousands in the US alone every month.

The reason for not talking about that is that it's not relevant for this discussion. Deaths due to the earthquake that are unrelated to the nuclear power plant do not help us to assess nuclear accident risk.

Same goes for your airline security example. Car related accidents/attacks are unrelated to airplane accidents/attacks.

If nuclear power plants slowly created an exclusion zone around them that grows over time, then you would have a point since each individual plant would have a tiny exclusion zone, but the problem is that the accidents are the result of gross negligence in the cases of both Chernobyl and Fukushima. Arguing about modern safety standards is meaningless by the way. Back when the Fukushima accident happened, the Fukushima power plant was older than the one in Chernobyl. This tells us two things. People build unsafe nuclear power plant designs, even when safer ones are available and second, when regulations get stricter, the bad power plants stick around for decades until they fail. If you wanted to put nuclear power plants into the best spotlight possible, you would demand old power plants be replaced by new designs, since that massively reduces the risk of another accident that makes nuclear power look bad. However, what we hear all the time is that the nuclear power plant industry wants less safety regulations so that they can cheaply repeat mistakes of the past.