@sj_zero >deal with materials that can be turned into weapons of mass destruction
Many materials can be turned into weapons of mass destruction via chemistry.

> there's a risk of big disasters that can permanently make a chunk of a country uninhabitable
It's more of a temporary thing.

Chernobyl was pure stupidity, with a poorly designed reactor in a flammable casing that wasn't a containment dome.

Nature is going pretty well around Chernobyl, as urbanization is a hell of a lot more deadly to animals than the deadly radiation from an unconfined, melted down nuclear reactor.

As for Fukushima, that was a very old reactor complex that was meant to be built on the top of a cliff.

They decided to built it into the cliff and didn't check the tsunami record and so didn't build a high enough sea wall (a reactor across the coast had a high enough sea wall and was fine), so the cooling system failed.

Despite multiple hydrogen explosions, the reactor containment vessels are still intact.

I think 1 guy died from leukemia that probably was caused by his work cleaning the reactor?

Of course an excessively large area around the Fukushima area was evacuated, killing a few old people who couldn't take the stress of the move.

>can hurt people in a massive region so there's a massive regulatory burden.
People are convinced that nuclear power stations can explode like a nuclear bomb, so there's a massive regulatory burden.

Even spicy fallout from a nuclear bomb is only so bad and the effects decay with time (see Hiroshima).

>Coal is really inexpensive
It seems inexpensive until you realize how much coal needs to be actually bought.

For the same amount of electrical generation, coal releases far more radiation than a nuclear reactors, as all coal has a certain amount of radioactive material in it and a huge amount of coal is burnt - part of the radiation is released as radioactive gas (if I remember correctly) and the rest goes into the fly ash.

Coal plants can dump the fly ash wherever they want to really, whether that's into a landfill or into roads - it's very radioactive, it's just that the radiation is diluted.

Nuclear power plant "waste" is intentionally kept concentrated to maximize the power density and so it can be treated and used again, it's just cheaper to mine more Uranium, so "waste" tends to be kept around while it cools down and then it's either re-processord or placed into suitable underground disposal and forgotten about (or sometimes dumped straight into the middle of the ocean and then nothing happens).


When it comes to the total death toll for humans and other animals for large scale power generation, I'm pretty sure Nuclear power has the lowest death toll per TWh.