I'm trying to reconcile your numbers with the Wikipedia "Aviation safety” article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety

which for 2019 describes "0.5 accidents per million departures" and "40 fatalities per trillion revenue passenger kilometers". Considering that many or most passengers fly close to 800-1000 km/h, we're still quite a bit above above 1 fatality per 100 million passenger hours.

Would a factor of 10 be enough? Suppose we go from one major accident per fortnight to one per five months (10 fortnights). Is that higher than what we have seen in the past thirty years?

And yet we could regulate even more to make flying even safer, but likely negatively impacting the cost of flying.

This is a balance/tradeoff. We agree for some deaths, for a given price. It is the same for food safety, workplace safety.

With the latest designs and regulations there has been no major issue across all the nuclear facilities, except for Fukushima which sustained a 9 earthquake + a tsunami... and yet hardly any death (in the 10 years after, one death by cancer got compensated but still not clear if it was directly linked... the evacuation itself might be responsible for up to 50 deaths though, showing how the perception of nuclear can be overhyped).

It is possible that the nuclear industry is over-regulated (done mostly after Chernobyl) and could benefit to be reviewed based on the current knowledge.

Without doing or seeing the actual math, my intuition leans on the side of it's probably much more efficient to put people together under certain constraints and fly them in one big container, than lots of unconstrained individual containers. See public transport vs cars for a similar tradeoff.

Two points:

Chernobyl was a poor, badly run reactor that was designed badly decades ago. I don't know why we paint all of nuclear with that brush, other than folks fall victim to availability bias all the time.

The other point is that we sweep aside externalities for all forms of power generation. People don't think of coal as dangerous, but it's killed far more than nuclear.

Ok plenty of responses to the Chernobyl thing, but without a definition of "safe" it's a moot argument. The injury per watt hour speaks for itself, unless you had something else in mind.

It turns you are right that there was a ton of BS around the Chernobyl accident...but going in the other direction.

Every decade, the WHO publishes a report on the health effects of Chernobyl. Every decade, they had to reduce the projections for casualties.

By an order of magnitude.

When it happened, we didn't know better. Now we do.

How many towns were closed in order to strip mine coal? And no, that's not just a thing of the past but still happening today.

How many people's health was impacted from coal and coal burning exhaust, which btw. also includes radioactive particles.

A whole town got pulled out of their flats and was never allowed back

How does that measure against a whole planet being pulled out of thermal equilibrium, and the projected displacement of 1 billion people?

What sort of nonsense statistic is fatalities per watt hour?

People agree with fatalities per hour of travel because it makes sense. If you're a really frequent flyer, you are more likely to die. In nuclear, I don't give a crap how many watt hour the plant 1000km away from me is generating, I don't want it to affect me. I am however OK with the plant next door affecting me, because I have a say in that. I can choose to live elsewhere.

Someone mentioned rooftop solar causing more deaths. If my rooftop solar falls on my head, only I die.

You can't just reduce everything to aggregate statistics. The relationship and proximity of the affected to the thing that causes the accident also matters.

> Coal

Yes, but the miners die, and only his family face the consequences. Some unrelated guy 50km away doesn't. BIG difference.

Now, modern nuclear plants have way better containment, and e.g I advocate heavily for SMRs [1]. But the fear of nuclear pre-SMR is completely justified and correct as I argued above.

[1] I suppose practically, the ones with 10km radius are also OK. Gen III I think? That is a reasonable region to tell people "if you live here, you might have to evacuate and you might be screwed". Any system with a zone beyond that should always be opposed.

Yes that's the point. Dam failure is much worse and actually the largest event of fatalities related to power generation was a dam breaking. Yet people are not against dams at all, even though they are not much better in terms of risks.

It's entirely irrational just like people who are scared of flying.

It's actually not, as it correctly states 50 direct fatalities.

What is grossly messed up are, or were, the initial projections of thousands, ten-thousand, no hundreds of thousands or even millions of fatalities.

The WHO does a report every decade on the health effects of Chernobyl. Each report had to reduce the projected fatalities by an order of magnitude.

One or two reports ago, the psycho-social effects of the evacuation and loss of income from the plant became greater than the effects of radiation, whether direct or indirect.

And of course all the fatalities and more or less all the negative health effects of Fukushima were due to the unnecessary evacuations.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095758201...

Neither case justifies turning off other nuclear reactors. Not even a little.

Radiophobia is more dangerous than radiation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia

> How many people got leukemia in neighboring countries and other complications that cut their lives short.

Not that many, according to long term studies.

Not many unlike what you want to believe. And there is no mechanism to directly link them to the nuclear meltdown. Since they are suspiciously clustered in specific places, it is more likely that there are other environmental and genetic problems that have more influence than the result of secondary radiation.

In addition to what other comments have said below, it's also important to state that the indirect impacts of the alternatives aren't widely studied, so it's practically impossible to compare. How do we figure out how many people have a significant impact on their life because of the fossil fuel we burn and put all sorts of crap into the atmosphere?