More people die mining coal eachyear than have died in Nuclear power plant accidents in the entire history of Nuclear power.
The Bhopal chemical plant disaster killed more people than all the nuclear power incidents in history combined. This plant manufactured pesticides.
Nuclear power is not completely risk free, but it's much safer than most people give it credit for. Anyone who would picket a nuclear power plant before a coal plant or a pesticide plant is an uninformed twit.
Nuclear power also promises to get much safer. China is currently testing thorium reactors based on Canada's CANDU design. Thorium reactors have several safety advantages over Uranium reactors, produce less waste with a shorter half-life, and do not produce weapons-grade fissionable materials as a byproduct. Thorium is far more abundant than Uranium to boot. If Iran went after Thorium based nuclear power Israel would be able to sleep more easily at night.
More people die mining coal each year than have died in Nuclear power plant accidents in the entire history of Nuclear power.
Just noting that to fairly compare apples to apples, you should compare stats of coal mining deaths and accidents to uranium mining deaths and accidents.
That statistic would be even more violently pro-nuclear -- you need to dig up roughly 20 000 times more coal than uranium to produce the similar amounts of energy, assuming a steam thermal coal plant and a light-water nuclear reactor. If you swap that light-water plant to an advanced heavy water plant like CANDU, that multiplier goes up to about 2 000 000 times. A fun fact: the extractable amount of energy in the trace radioactive elements (notably thorium) that is dug up with coal (and mostly distributed into the environment) is several times higher than the extractable energy content of the coal.
> More people die mining coal each year than have died in Nuclear power plant accidents in the entire history of Nuclear power.
And the miner deaths are completely insignificant part of the total death toll of coal. Most of the death toll comes from NOx and SO2 poisoning, and manifests in cancer and respiratory diseases. The total death toll is hard to tally, but it is typically estimated to be between 100k and 1M a year.
The Bhopal chemical plant disaster killed more people than all the nuclear power incidents in history combined. This plant manufactured pesticides.
Nuclear power is not completely risk free, but it's much safer than most people give it credit for. Anyone who would picket a nuclear power plant before a coal plant or a pesticide plant is an uninformed twit.
Nuclear power also promises to get much safer. China is currently testing thorium reactors based on Canada's CANDU design. Thorium reactors have several safety advantages over Uranium reactors, produce less waste with a shorter half-life, and do not produce weapons-grade fissionable materials as a byproduct. Thorium is far more abundant than Uranium to boot. If Iran went after Thorium based nuclear power Israel would be able to sleep more easily at night.