No energy source is 100% safe. People die when working on windmills and hydroelectric disasters are way more deadly than nuclear disasters. I think 100% safe is an unreasonable requirement.
That's 20/day dead from pollution just in USA.
Nuclear disasters are verified at about 2400 deaths over 41 years. Around 1/week.
Yeah ... crazy hard to make a safe energy source.
1: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-other-reason-...
2:
0 deaths for 3 Mile Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_Nuclear_Gene...
142 deaths for chernobyl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
2203 deaths for Fukushima (2202 of which were due to the evacuation itself) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
PS: the "more per day than nuclear ever" bit comes from The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace
20 / day are not killed in coal plant explosions ever day.
Yet the numbers you compare are from nuclear disasters. As far as I know, there are no numbers for the number of people killed in coal plant explosions and they certainly would not be 20/day
Now, how to count the number of people impacted by Chernobyl.
Do the numbers include the increase in cancer deaths in the north of Norway? The radiation in the moss that reindeer eat meant the meat could not be eaten for quite a long time and it is still not over.
I think that is more like comparing apples to apples, than explosions vs long term exposure.
https://www.ozy.com/flashback/230000-died-in-a-dam-collapse-...
With hydroelectric accident you drown. The end.
Luckily not that common especially with well-maintained dams. But it was a huge fear with the Mosul dam in Iraq, which was expected to put over a million lives at risk during the ISIL insurgency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosul_Dam
I'm not anti-hydro at all! But it's important to understand how powerful these dams are...
I don't have data but I assume that most immediate dam breach deaths are from acute force trauma (and then drowning) rather than from just drowning. Less similar to the slow death of being without a boat in the middle of an ocean than to the hypothetical of getting stomped by the Terry Gilliam foot in Flying Circus.
Suddenly, Chernobyl doesn't sound that bad anymore.