Fukushima was the nail in the coffin. A lot of people don't remember Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl had been spun (not unreasonably) as Soviet incompetence. People in general were cautiously tolerant of nuclear until Fukushima. It's a damn shame.
So even before Fukushima, there’d be delay after delay for more studies and impact and safety concerns for new projects and old ones getting shut down mostly due to thd ghosts of 3MI and Chernobyl.
Of course it doesn’t help to engender confidence in the tech as this legacy is the baggage any new tech faces in any consideration.
Well Tōhoku tsunami and earthquake killed 15,000+ people and yet everyone only talks about the nuclear plant that was hit with it.
At some point you just have to accept that human mind has an irrational fear on rare but dramatic events
> Meanwhile coal kills a 200,000 per year while operating normally!
Coal is definitely the worst conventional energy generation tech. No wonder nuclear advocates love to focus on it as if it's the only alternative. That said, do you know anyone who died from coal?
Personally no. But in production of coal you have many miners’ lives cut short as a direct consequence of mining activities. Now, that’s short of the annual number listed there but this is a known direct consequence.
Have you seen the dose rates in the area recently and compared them to the higher end of natural background in inhabited areas on Earth? If not I recommend you do. It's very reasonable to evacuate an area during a massive nuclear accident. When the dose rate goes down, it's very reasonable to go back. Here's a handy reference: [1]. The main point is that global warming gets rid of even more inhabitable land by pushing people out of cities en masse.
> No wonder nuclear advocates love to focus on it as if it's the only alternative.
Nuclear is safer than almost every other energy source. More people fall of their roofs installing solar panels per TWh than people die from nuclear accidents. Hydro has killed people by the 100,000 as well. Shoot, even wind kills people with ice-throw [2].
> That said, do you know anyone who died from coal?
A few hundred thousand per year, but no I don't actually know any of those people. Do you know anyone who has died from nuclear power, which kills 6 orders of magnitude fewer people?
The main point is that global warming is the serious threat and we should throw all serious low-carbon energy sources at it. Nuclear is the only large-scale operational low-carbon source that can run through daily and seasonal weather shifts, so it should play a large role. Wind and solar are needed as well, at about 20x their current deployment.
[1] https://xkcd.com/radiation/ [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
Belarus has not commissioned its first nuclear plant yet, but already two construction workers died on its construction. That's already +INF amount of deaths per TW generated nationally.
> Do you know anyone who has died from nuclear power, which kills 6 orders of magnitude fewer people?
I actually do, met a dying Chernobyl liquidator in early 1990s.