Areas around coal power plants can exceed radioactivity limits for nuclear power plants, due to trace elements in the soot landing back down. Never mind all the other stuff.

That’s pretty nasty, I’d rather be close to a nuclear power plant.

Coal plants might render the entire planet unlivable within the next century. When weighed against the theoretical worst case impact of climate collapse, the theoretical worst case impact for nuclear power (that is, every single plant exploding and contaminating a 30 mile radius) is still vanishing by comparison.

Checkout deaths per capita statistics

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

Coal plants release ash into the air and groundwater continuously, in the course of normal operation. This ash is around five times more radioactive than soil.

Instead coal plants working normally slowly pump more radiation into atmosphere than occasionally exploding nuclear plants...

I guess deaths per energy unit produced ?

According to this [1], for every death caused by nuclear power, 350 people die because of coal power.

Note that most of these people died as a consequence of Chernobyl accident (~4000 vs ~500), so by current standards Nuclear Power is probably even safer.

The issue with nuclear is that deaths are concentrated in a few "big" accidents, that have much more visibility and leave a lasting impressions, thus scaring the population much more. (This is not unique to nuclear power though, something similar happens with plane vs car travel: the latter causes generally more deaths, but plan accidents are more newsworthy).

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

burning coal kills people and does a whole lot of damage just by running normally. it doesn't have to explode

> No exploding coal plant will render a whole region unlivable for >30 years

Unlivable for humans. The exclusion zone around Chernobyl became a de facto wild-life sanctuary. To the extent that some environmentalists now argue benefits of officially maintaining it as one indefinitely. Human supporting activities such as farming, mining and habitat expansion often come at a serious cost to local ecosystems. Nature ends up flourishing over time in humans excluded regions exactly because they are unlivable for > 30 years.

As pointed out by others, one effect of burning coal is the concentration of its radioactive elements in fly ash. And since less care is taken, more radioactive material ends up released into the environment by coal plants than nuclear plants. It's worth pointing out however, when contrasted with background, risks from exposure to radioactivity is not significantly raised by living near coal plants. The real killer from coal is pollution. Having said that, accumulation of fly ash over time could be a concern, especially wherever it gathered under non-uniform dispersal. As far as I know, this is yet to be shown.

Perhaps a stronger example of society's inconsistent reasoning about radioactivity exposure is inhalation of tobacco smoke. It's curious that information on the significant amounts of radioactive material in tobacco smoke did not percolate widely and probably would not have changed habits anyway, given its known carcinogenic nature was already not enough to do so.

The point is that there was never a time where Nuclear became unsafe. It was never a lie.

The reverse of your analogy would be if cigarettes were actually good for you but we banned them because two people died of lung cancer.

That's not accurate. By the 1960s and 70s, the scientific consensus [1] not only strongly believed smoking was a causal factor in lung cancer but also knew it contained radioactive isotopes of Polonium (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2509609/) and lead.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/sgr/history/inde...

We were talking about deaths or displaced in the first place? By a measure of deaths, nuclear energy is very safe.

If fossil fuel power plants were legally responsible for harm caused by their carbon emissions, they would also be impossible to insure.

Being impossible to insure is related more to a high degree of synchronization of risk pools than overall danger of death. Death rates are averages - it is possible that one person dying per time period is rate-equivalent to the whole town dying at once in a once-in-a-tens-of-millenia event. But the risk exposure in that event is quite different.

You can get life insurance/death benefits as a mercenary or even as a centarian. It will be expensive because of the high risk of payout but you can get it. Because while it is probable that you will cack it from being so damn old/being a combatant in unstable regions with lesser support it is extremely unlikely every mercenary or centarian they have insured will die at once.